SFL Archives Vol 11 readthrough update 06

 54% completion, 152 bookmarks

-1986 TUCKER AWARDS email clarification comes out. 3 awards: 1 each for SF Professional (writer, editor, or dealer), SF Artist, and SF Fan. 4 people are nominated for each award. VOTING DEADLINE IS 1 NOVEMBER 1986

(2020 note: The 1986 Tucker Award looks to be rigged Hugo Award and Nebula Award style. Surely the 2 people nominated with the last name of Tucker [sarcasm]are there by random chance and not nepotism[/sarcasm]) 

-20th Century Fox is in talks with Paramount Studios to develop and create a new STAR TREK tv-series. SFLer reactions to this news-leak range from excited to doubtful and then to extremely angry. The extremely angry SFlers use the STAR TREK 1 & STAR TREK 3 movies as examples of new Star Trek characters being introduced just to kill them off 40 minutes later.

-Besides (*wink* possibly *wink*) working on a new STAR TREK tv-series, in 1986 ..."20th Century Fox appears to be trying to start a 4th nationwide TV Network. (Ted Turner is too apparently)" . 

-The many SciFi & Fantasy writers that post on the SF-LOVERS mailing list are trying to get a informal writers group going to exchange and critique SF&F stories. Robert J Sawyer chooses to self-doxx himself  2nding the informal writers group idea, and then doxxes a few other incognito SF-LOVERS SF&F writers just for the hell of it.

-Tolkienian debate continues. This time elf reincarnation vs what orcs, dwarves and humans get when they die. More Maiar debates. What happened to Saruman and Sauron after their "deaths" in Return of the King. One of the bigger Tolkenian lore arguers obviously read "death of the author" and now thinks they are deploying secret unbeatable arguments from it to support their hyper-stupid "JRR Tolkien merely translated LotR and is not the original source of it, therefore everything I say re: Tolkienian lore makes sense".

-Lloyd Biggle Jr's SILENCE IS DEADLY, originally mentioned back in SFL Archives Vol 03 or Vol 04 comes up again. 

(2020 note: Repeating this almost verbatim from my 1981 SFL recaps...One of the low-notes of the SFL Archives readthrough was the nasty reaction back in 1981 when deaf SciFi fans made pleas for finding "deaf-friendly fiction" and help tracking down transcriptions of the HitchHiker Guide to the Galaxy BBC Radio broadcasts

Hearing disabled Scifi stories were rare as hell in the 1980's, and probably remain rare as hell now-ish. 2020 people: Please, please disprove me on this. I want to be wrong.)

- I, MARTHA ADAMS by Pauline Glen Winslow. "America has become complacent & surrenders to the Russians after they destroy certain military bases.  One woman fights back.  This book has good ingredients for a movie - pyrotechnics, politics, bad guys beating upon good guys, suspense, and sex.  Oh, yes, let us not forget a strong female lead". 

(2020 note: I have no idea. It sounds terrible in a uniquely libertarian feminist survivalist way.)

-Steve Perry's Matador trilogy (THE MAN WHO NEVER MISSED, MATADORA, THE MACHIAVELLI INTERFACE) comes up, and it is a "martial artist revolutionary takes on an evil empire" space opera mish-mash. 

-GENERAL TECHNICS, "the organization for science fiction fans with an interest in do-it-yourself technology, will be held Friday morning, 29 August 1986, at 10 AM, Constellation in Atlanta." 

-ALIENS 1986 movie chat kicks off big-time. A few SFLers are fascinated by the life-cycle of the Alien xenomorphs, others nitpick the travel time of the USS Sulaco (the SpaceMarines spaceship) vs Ripley's drifting lifepod, which of the survivors possibly got impregnated with Alien zygotes, and how did Ripley not get blown out of the airlock/close that airlock near the end of Aliens 1986, etc.

-Someone asks for erotic SF favorites, and Hank Buurman, the SFLer who doesn't believe in privacy for others, fervently recommends John Varley's Millenium and Titan series for the weird erotic sex scenes in them.

-Gene Wolfe at the 1986 ARCHON SFCon tells people the 5th BotNS book is almost ready, the effort Wolfe puts into finding the right word to evoke the nuances he wants, and that there is two mistakes he knows of in the first 4 BotNS volumes; a proofreader missing a typo resulting in <Artello> instead of <Martello> and one obscure mistake Gene Wolfe doubts anyone else will find.

-Chesley Bonestell, a longtime SciFi cover artist dies in 1986 and a SFL writes a mini-memorial about their work in Scifi and as a normal special effects artist working on movies like CITIZEN KANE and DESTINATION MOON.

 -Chris Foss's science fiction artwork gets mentioned. Besides Foss's better known work painting spaceship cover art, 1986 SFLers think it's amusing that Chris Foss did the artwork for the Joy of Sex.

-SFLer WorldCon parties get mentioned, with  '@!%'  on posters/signs being the secret code SFLers used to self-identify themselves to people in the know. Worldcon SFLer parties have come up before, because I distinctly remember a "Would whoever grabbed the cables I used to hookup the portable computer-terminal at last week's Worldcon, please return them to me" happening at least once.

-SFLer confusion over what SILENT RUNNING other SFLer's keep referencing. Are they referring to the Mike & the Mechanics song "Silent Running"?  Or are they referencing the 1977 movie Silent Running? Or are people conflating the two? (2020 note: Yes. Yes. And Yes.)

-Laserdisc's being bleeding edge technology circa 1986. 

-SFLer Craig Wheeler cuts the bull and directly promotes his upcoming novel THE KRONE EXPERIMENT, due out October 1986.

SFL Archives Vol 07 readthrough

 SFL Vol 07 is extremely short. Vol 07 picks up 2  months into 1983(not normal)  with a brand new SF-LOVERS mailing list moderator-maintainer. TCP/IP was a spooky-new technology being tested for SFL Digest distribution versus relying on hardcoded AarpaNet network links on dying 1970's era hardware leading to multiple week long gaps in between SFL Digests being sent out. 

-Dr Robert Forward asked the SFL mailing list for help finding a wizard of CAD to create the illustrations of variable usage robots in Forwards serialized story/upcoming book ROCHEWORLD aka FLIGHT OF THE DRAGONFLY. 

-Yet another scifi genre writer revealed themselves in the SFL archives. (I've done no lookups into any of the self-doxxed authors that have posted in the SFL archives other than Dr Robert Forward/Dr Robert Forward's edgelord son)

-RETURN OF THE JEDI (1983) came out. The shoe-horned in muppets and Ewok's and Lucas being more interested in in cinematography than telling a story are what most of the negative reactions re SFL "Return of the Jedi" posts are about. Very funny reading 37 years later, especially funny given how George Lucas tripled down on those factors for STAR WARS: THE PHANTOM MENACE.

-Glen Cook and Gene Wolfe and John Brunner got mentioned and discussed multiple times. Added tracking down Brunner's THE SHEEP LOOK UP, and Wolfe's CASTLE OF THE OTTER to my reading list.

-Mack Reynolds obituary notice. Mack Reynolds is still the best hardcore socialist scifi/fantasy writer I've ever come across. China Miéville and Ken Macleod are weak/terrible sellout in comparison. Mack Reynolds walked the hardcore socialist walk back when going to jail for being a socialist or getting black-balled was a real and omnipresent thing.

-An uber Libertarian mil-fiction series all about Texas and Texans kicking names and taking ass of everyone and everything else in the world got mentioned positively first, then not so positively mentioned.
Daniel Da Cruz is the author, THE AYES OF TEXAS is the series starting book, and the book plot is 100% ripped off from SPACE BATTLESHIP YAMATO only Texas-ified

-People who "crack-ping" on the Jeffrey Epstein threads will be delighted that Donald Barr, father of the current US Attorney General, gets mentioned for the first time ever by a weird Canadian that liked Donald Barr's writing in SPACE RELATIONS/A PLANET IN ARMS

-Stephen R. Donaldson's THOMAS COVENANT series got discussed repeatedly, but I don't give a fuck about Thomas Covenant at all, and hold to a special theory about the books. It was all a meth-fantasy/it was all a shared meth-fantasy when the secondary main character (Linden Avery) showed up.

-WARGAMES (1983) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0086567/ ended up as the bridge-too-far moment/total user-meltdown topic for a SFL user that had been posting in the SFL mailing since the very beginning (September 1979). The technical inaccuracies in Wargames 1983 made this long-time SFL user snap, and angry post multiple times at length about Wargames 1983. Given that the SFL user's IRL job was/is computer security related, most of the anger/frustration appears to be coming from a unspoken "oh shit this movie is going to inspire a never-ending wave of hacking attempts by phone freaks/arpanet people....on all the systems I support/my friends support"

(2020 sidenotes:
For people not really familiar with the 1970s-80s, malicious phone phreaking and malicious computer hacking were becoming major issues in the 1980s. Prior to the malicious turn, motivation for phone-phreaking in the 1970s-80s was more for the lulz and giving a middle finger to the monolithic omnipresent Bell Telephone Company, and computer systems were isolated mainframes or very open non-networked computer systems.

Google Kevin Mitnick, Kevin Poulsen, both of whom turned legit/as-legit as possible given their history. Poulsen wrote a mostly amusing non-fiction book about another convicted computer hacker titled Kingpin: How One Hacker Took Over the Billion-Dollar Cybercrime Underground.)

originally posted between July 22nd -July 24th in the SomethingAwful forums Science Fiction Fantasy Megathread 3

SFL Archives Vol 03 readthrough update 03

-Dell killed off their entire scifi publishing line, including the prestige labels. 

2020 sidenote: Thought this was a result of end-of-year price bumps not getting the sales targets Dell was aiming for. Looking slightly behind the scenes circa year 2020 vision (ha), it seems that the Dell Publishing buyout by DOUBLEDAY had entered "asset stripping mode", maybe to help Doubleday payoff debt from another recent Doubleday acquisition, the NEW YORK METS baseball team.

-EXCALIBUR (1981) the movie came out, and the SFL archive has been full of "I am not angry, I am super-angry that the movie did not adhere 100% to The Whole Book of King Arthur and of His Noble Knights of the Round Table", or "Hey Arthurian myth has lots of forms and versions, why you so mad?" and "Read more <arthurian myth> dumbasses, the movie adapted multiple arthurian sources", etc.

-Despite live-posting the first attempted manned launch of the Space Shuttle program, absolutely no one seemed to give a f**k when Columbia launched successfully two days later, and landed successfully 2 days after that. Instead it was "What ever happened to the Space Shuttle named Enterprise?" /"It's the prototype test Shuttle, it might get turned into a real boy real Space Shuttle if Congress funds it" Spoilers unneeded, Congress did not fund it. 

-I apparently spoke too soon about people not giving a f**k about the first manned Space Shuttle landing. At least 3 SFL subscribers ran into each other at the 1st manned Space Shuttle landing exhibition and recognized each other from overhearing references to a recent SFL verbal meme. This email took a week plus after being sent to finally appear in the SFL mailing list.

-the MENSA ad opened the gateway, and barely disguised product review advertisements have started to creep into the SFL mailing list.

-Newcomers to the SFL mailing list being confused by cryptic messages and unknown acronym usages, and ironically confusing people by their use of unknown acronyms.

-Massive amount of requests for "DOWN IN FLAMES", which circa 1981, had only seen print in a discontinued fanzine (Trumpet #10)

-A "Deaf people are scifi fans too. How about some scifi stories rec's/radio transcript adaptions for deaf people?" request got some very ugly feedback before SFL posters just started to list fiction with deaf aliens/aliens that have no concept of sound. Not a great moment for the SFL archives to be honest.

-Harlan Ellison demonstrates his skillz by writing a short story in the "show window of the B. Dalton Bookstore on Fifth Avenue" live from a image suggested by a person onsite.

-Twenty days worth of scifi themed juvenile fiction chat in the SFL archives means I'm finally dropping juvenile series names that SFL archive posters grew up reading. DANNY DUNN, SPACE CAT, MUSHROOM PLANET, etc. Eleanor Cameron was very highly regarded by SFL posters. Most of the juvenile series would be cartoons today, with the Danny Dunn series being a very very close match to Disney's Phineas and Ferb.

-sexbots, gynoids, heinlein stories, words with *-trix endings (all these are connected)

-Gene Wolfe's BOOK OF THE NEW SUN books start getting discussed.

-Lancelot the goat-unicorn got mentioned a few more times, and so did it's owners/creators. Morning Glory was big into the Aleister Crowley/Donald Trump school of belief that "press mentions are life, bad publicity is better than no publicity at all", and apparently showed up to one fantasy-scifi convention wearing only white body-paint saying that she was a giant bottle of correction fluid.

-you don't talk about Fight Club in public SF-LOVERS, HUMAN-NETS, or any of the Large Mailing Lists directly in any form whatsoever.

[ Everyone planning to meet at NCC '81 should please take care not

to mention SF-LOVERS, HUMAN-NETS, or any of the Large Mailing Lists

directly in any form whatsoever. To do so would violate the

security of these lists, threatening their existence. Rather, it

has proved effective at past conventions to simply post notices

directing people to REDACTED@REDACTED, REDACTED@REDACTED, or REDACTED group.

Please take care to be cryptic so that people who do not know about

the Large Lists will remain ignorant. - REDACTED ] 

it was full-bore '50's/60's/70's juvenile print and multimedia entertainment nostalgia chat until RotLA came out, and even then it took CLASH OF THE TITANS (1981), SUPERMAN 2(1981) and DRAGONSLAYER (1981) to derail juvenile entertainment nostalgia chat. Finally RODOF, the twice doxxed son of Dr Robert Forward, came forward (terrible pun but I'm keeping it) to end Vol 03 on a creepy note [Subject: Hymen Hijinx].

-RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK chat was mainly angrily posting unfavorable reviews of RotLA, arguing whether Belloq ate a fly during the Bazooka-Indy standoff, seeing C3P0 & R2D2 in wall inscriptions of the buried city of Tanis, everyone saying that Indy shooting the swordsman got the highest audience reaction, and then trying to break down why in SMG/BotL style, followed by infinite seeming waves of punny RotLA sequel concept titles.

-Clash of Titans chat included 2 profiles of Ray Harryhausen, wooden acting, not sticking to Greek myths as understood/remembered, slams about Harryhausen's work, body doubles...all in all; the people who were the most vocal about Excalibur 1981 (mentioned in earlier Vol 03 recaps) were also the most vocal posters about Clash of Titans.

-Nothing big on Superman 2 chat other than long-exposed to public awareness behind-the-scenes drama involving Donner and Superman 1/2. Dragonslayer 1981 mostly got mentioned for the early CGI/first generation digital optical efforts in it, then...

-RODOF made a series of posts about [Subject: Hymen Hijinx]...........in Dragonslayer (1981). Everywhere you think those RODOF posts probably went re: [Subject: Hymen Hijinx], Yup, you are correct. Bonus correctness points go to people whom also predicted "I wasn't being serious in my earlier posts, I was only joking BUT....".

originally posted between July 3rd - July 6th in the SomethingAwful forums Science Fiction Fantasy Megathread 3