SFL Archives Vol 11 readthrough update 11

 100% completion, 180 ruthlessly curated bookmarks.

-The SIME/GEN stuff I was wondering about way back in SFL Vol 11 update 02 gets clarified. Sime/Gen is post-apocalypse style S&M co-dependency. Fans of Dungeons and Dragons fans, think of mind-flayers and their "protected client" races.

-SFLer's start compiling list of stories with sentient computers in them, lists of post-Apocalypse stories, and lists of exactly what items SFLer's would bring to the past if subjected to time-travel with moderate advanced warning.

(2020 note: This is where fear of Japan's sudden rise as a unstoppable economic superpower in the 1980's starts making it way into SF stories, with Japan's upcoming "5th generation" of computer systems that would change everything (computer-related) ending up as the boogie-man of more than a few 1980's post-apocalypse novels. 1980's Japan's rise to economic superpower status being built on skyscrapers full of deferred debt plus the "5th generation" of computer systems being 110% vaporware weren't understood until the Japanese economic Bubble burst in the mid 1990's.) 

-Society for Creative Anachronism SFLers chime in on the "weapons policies at conventions" discussion thread, giving examples of how the SCA deals with them in "normal" SCA situations, and anecdotes of real-life PVP combat arena weapons usage.

-One of the sentient computer stories consistently getting mentioned is D.F. Jones 1960's COLOSSUS novels, which did ground-work on the "computer AI takes over the world, thinks Humans massively suck" trope that James Cameron's TERMINATOR movies would make famous.

-Jean Auel's CLAN OF THE CAVE BEAR gets mentioned as being her first novel and having mind-breaking huge sales numbers. Which is why the paperback version of Auel's MAMMOTH HUNTERS will have a 2,000,000 copy first printing. The only modern equivalent I can think of regarding those numbers is JK Rowling and the HARRY POTTER series.

-Larry Niven's KNOWN SPACE/RINGWORLD chat derails intense AMBER series slash Roger Zelazny trivia chat. The Winter 1986 version of Niven chat is about the technology of the Known Space/Ringworld settings and some anecdotes of Niven being bad at math in the Ringworld books.

-HITCHHIKERS GUIDE TO THE GALAXY discussion kicks off with wondering about Zaphod B.'s extra body parts/anecdotes of Douglas Adams having a hard time being identified as THAT Douglas Adams IRL.

-STAR WARS fans start trying to figure out what eras the upcoming prequel & sequel trilogies will focus on.

-Death notices for Ian Marter (DOCTOR WHO series actor) and Roger C. Carmel (original actor of STAR TREK character Harry Mudd). 

-Iain Banks WALKING ON GLASS gets recommended, which marks the first appearance (I think) of Iain (M) Banks in the SF-LOVERS mailing list. 

-1986 SciFi personality David Gerrold talks about what he knows about/what will happen with the upcoming STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION tv-series at the 1986 LosCon.

-Two books that share a theme of first contact with alien intelligence manage to come out within months of each other. The books are CONTACT by Carl Sagan and THE HERCULES TEXT by Jack McDevitt. Diane Duane's SO YOU WANT TO BE A WIZARD has been out in hardcover for a while.

-Colin Baker retires as the 6th DOCTOR WHO actor in December 1986.

-The 1980's version of TWILIGHT ZONE series is cancelled by CBS in December 1986, and the BBC's TV adaptation of the TRIPODS by John Christopher also gets cancelled.

-STAR TREK 4 comes out and SFL reaction is mostly positive but confused by the small amounts of normal Star Trek content in it. So SFLer's focus on what Starfleet spaceships got murked by the Alien probe, which Starfleet spaceship was deploying a (Solar) Sail, why that SF Golden Gate park trash-can didn't blow away when the cloaked Bounty landed, why ionization made the Klingon transporters on the Bounty fail, why/how the 20th century engineer knew 6 inch thick plasteel slabs were needed to hold back that specific amount of water, time-loops, and which of the many Constitution class Starfleet vessels murked by the Alien probe got rebranded as Enterprise NCC-1701-A

-Women constituting 90 percent of the fanzine writing/publishing population in Star Trek fandom is brought up and confirmed by people deep into Star Trek fanzine lore.

-Camille Bacon-Smith's moderately deep dive into Star Trek fanzine culture, Spock Among the Women, is transcribed and shared for educational purposes to the SF-LOVERS mailing list (Spock Among the Women originally appeared in the November 16th 1986 Sunday edition of the New York Times newspaper).

SFL Archives Vol 11 readthrough update 03

 SFL Archives Vol 11: 25% completion, 78 bookmarks (more than a few bookmarks were redundant and got cleaned up)

-The reason why Alexei Panshin had a decades long break getting stories published becomes clearer. (Panshin apparently signed a multi-book contract for the advance money, Panshin then tried to weasel out of the book contract commitment by submitting stories *co-authored* with his wife...publishers did not react well to shenanigans they normally pulled on authors happening to them)

-One shot SF&F authors of the 1980's get discussed and a few of them/their stories sound interesting (Hilbert Schenck, Barrington Bayley, Denis Johnson, John Sladek, etc)

-COSMOS, a 17 chapter SF round-robin "write your way out of this" serial written almost exclusively by future SF editors/authors inside the 1933 fanzine SCIENCE FICTION DIGEST 

-Some SFLers have devolved into posting lists of books and author bibliographies in response to other SFLers making 1000+ word essay-posts

-SFLers start asking what deeper meaning Ridley Scott intended by costuming Tim Curry in gallons of red paint, a foam bodybuilder suit and fake horns in the 1985 movie LEGEND. (2020 take: Ridley Scott putting 97% of his effort on the visuals of a film & 1% effort on the movie script never gets hypothesized by 1986 SFLers)

-Vernor Vinge's PEACE WAR comes up, and how the bobbles (aka stasis field technology) in PEACE WAR could be used IRL across multiple fields like construction, civilian, military, space exploration, etc.

-Philip Jose Farmer's unauthorized vulturing of other SF&F authors work gets mentioned multiple times, re the PJF authored VENUS ON A HALF-SHELL and the PJF authored Necronomicon

-SFLers note that Jack Chalker's stories all seeming to have involuntary species + gender swaps for main characters and the subsequent kinky sex that happens due to species/gender changes makes me very happy I have only read one of Jack Chalker's stories (it was notable for the extreme speed of the plot movement vs modern fantasy books) and nothing more. 

-Diane Duane's STAR TREK novels get brought up and fans of Diane Duane/fans of STAR TREK fiction might find things of note being discussed that I haven't 

-More SFLer's discover Michael Moorcock and the ETERNAL CHAMPION stories, which [sarcasm mode]Robert Heinlein definitely did not rip off for his Number of the Beast book[/sarcasm mode].

-The SF-LOVERS t-shirt project gets relaunched with a cluttered seeming graphic design (two interstellar aliens reading SF-LOVERS on a terminal with a scarier interstellar alien creeping up behind the reader aliens)

-An SFLer on the hunt for unique for PhD thesis material asks "What is the etymology behind "filksongs/fens/fen?" (2020: I will 110% be skipping all further posts regarding this subject)

-Steven Brust regains ARPANET acess and happily continues posting to the SF-LOVERS mailing list, to my utter non-delight as a avid non-fan of SKZB

-Lots and lots of LORD OF THE RINGS/Tolkien lore chat: Is Gandalf one of the Maia, why didn't Gandalf instantly ace the door-lock "say friend" test trying to get into Moria, was Legolas a backwoods (giggle) uneducated elf-hick or was Legolas just not willing to embarrass Gandalf about elf-language in front of the mortals? (2020 note: I can't remember how many supplemental LoTR books Christopher Tolkien had published up to this point in 1986. Also, RIP Christopher Tolkien)

-Funny SF stories requests. Henry Kuttner gets recommended a bunch, especially Kuttner's "drunk inventor-genius" stories. Spider Robinson's work gets recommended too (2020 take: Spider Robinson is a trap. Do Not Read. DO NOT READ.) BILL THE GALACTIC HERO gets recommended (2020 take: Bill the Galactic Hero IS NOT a trap read.)

- HitchHiker's Guide to the Galaxy's Pan-Galactic Gargle Blaster fan recipes and anecdotes of drinking those fan recipes.

-The 1980's reboot of the TWILIGHT ZONE series viability is in doubt, and a doomed Save the Twilight Zone fan-campaign gets started.

-Locus Magazine mentions that Robert Aspirin has signed a multi-book deal for more MYTH stories (2020 take: Aspirin would pull a Panshin 2.0 move, only in Aspirin's case it was (mostly) IRS back-taxes related).

-A SFLer pitches a survey dedicated to filksong *cannonical collections of 'whimsically' regular words* and I promise to skip over any future posts on this just as much as posts about etymology of filksongs/fen/fens

-An PLAYBOY short story article called "TIME IS MONEY" gets brought up and discussed. (2020 take: doing a moderate reworking of that idea circa 2020 might win you the 2020/2021 PROMETHEUS AWARD aka the Hugo Award for Libertarians)

-1985 movie THE STUFF gets brought up again and from a 2020 standpoint it sounds more surrealistic than 1983 movie LIQUID SKY.

-CODEX SERAPHINIANUS gets brought up a few times. Knowing nothing about it  and refusing to google it, the CODEX SERAPHINIANUS sounds alot like the VOYNICH MANUSCRIPT https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voynich_manuscript

-Harlan Ellison and Ben Bova suing broadcast television networks & the producers of TERMINATOR 1 over stolen pitched-to-Hollywood ideas to get some sweet sweet settlement money comes up again. 

-A few SFLer's get around to watching Akira Kurosawa's HIDDEN FORTRESS and start noticing similarities/homages/outright scene reenactments of it that George Lucas did in STAR WARS: A NEW HOPE

-the AYES OF TEXAS get reviewed by Mark Leeper, and *even Mark Leeper, master of surface level oblivious reviews* picks up on the TEXAS slant in it.

SFL Archives Vol 10 readthrough update 04

-John Varley's short stories "THE BARBIE MURDERS", "PRESS ENTER" and "MILLENIUM" keep getting mentioned. From a 2020 perspective, John Varley's stories and writing aged better than Spider Robinson's work but not by much. 

-People can see the seams where Orson Scott Card's 1977 short story Ender's Game got Bloater-Drive expanded into the 1985 award winning novel ENDERS GAME.

-Female writers across multiple genres, and feminist SF gets discussed with Joanna Russ's HOW TO SUPRESS WOMEN'S WRITING getting prominently mentioned

-Isaac Asimov's creepy interactions with women gets brought up repeatedly as Fall 1985 hits. A particularly poorly aged Asimov penned article in the BOSKONE 22 program guide gets brought up. tldr...Asimov probably most definitely sexually harassed Shawna McCarthy out of her job as editor-in-chief of a little known SciFi magazine called "Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine". Keep in mind, this is 1985 SFL posters saying the Asimov Boskone 22 article aged poorly and to further clarify things Boskone 22 happened back in February 1985.

-Scientology starts getting discussed. Much EL RON HUUUUBBBBARRRD weirdness. A weirdly specific promotion contest for the upcoming BATTLEFIELD EARTH movie, to be filmed in Colorado.

(2020 sidenote: There was only one Battlefield Earth movie made, the year 2000 one starring John Travolta. It appears that Battlefield Earth was stuck in development hell for a long long time. For additional amusement factor, think of all the amazing books/book series with optioned movie rights that have been stuck in development limbo forever. Like STARS MY DESTINATION, old-man KING CONAN, CONFEDERACY OF DUNCES, CONSIDER PHLEBAS, etc. Now remember that the GOR series managed to have a real movie made starring real Hollywood actors....queue infinite Tidus from Final Fantasy X laugh).

-Really angry feedback happens when the 1985 SFLer whose gimmick is posting 800+ word essays on the "THE PROBLEMS OF SCIENCE FICTION TODAY" says that Spider Robinson is a hack writer (2020 take: TRUTH), and that Samuel R Delany's DHALGREN is over-rated. 

-A SFLer in 1985 manages to predict both the clone army Kill Order 66 gimmick and the Robot Drone armies in the STAR WARS prequel movies.

-Lack of new STAR WARS content has people Zapruder film analyzing Ewok cuteness levels, the uselessness of Storm Trooper armor, ammo clips vs charge-paks on blasters, whether or not blasters are energy weapons vs explosive projectiles, and how lightsabers really work (super polished mirrors, plasma and extending rigid mono-filaments get mentioned)

-A 1985 Paramount Studios press release giving the general real outline of STAR TREK 4 comes out, and ruins the vicarious fun of peoples wild-ass guesses about Star Trek 4's plot.

-A interesting recap-summary of the talk Ellen Asher of the Doubleday Science Fiction Book Club (SFBC) gave at a meeting of the New Jersey Science Fiction sometime in 1985. The recap summary mentioned the 7 different genre book clubs Doubleday had running at the time, and how book of the month selections were made, etc.

-Differences between the American & UK editions of the HITCHHIKERS GUIDE TO THE GALAXY books come up. It is mostly changes to what brand of cars people owned, the names of the Krikkit gate-key items, and Wowbagger the infinitely prolonged insults.

-Bookstore chains B. Dalton's and Waldenbooks (people who grew up in the USA during the 1980s & 1990s will remember these names) versus independently owned bookstores...lots of interesting sounding regional independent bookstores that may/may not/probably do not exist anymore.

-SFL Archives technical minutia chat including the origins of the SF-LOVERS mailing list and the real paranoia one of the longest running SF-LOVERS moderator had about getting called up before a Congressional committee headed by William Proxmire regarding SF-LOVERS leeching from US Government resources.

-DOCTOR WHO had a extended 18 month hiatus announced earlier in 1985 that threatened to be a permanent series ending hiatus. Mail in efforts, call in efforts to the BBC, and elected British officials got the hiatus window shrunk. One of the downsides or bonuses of the SFL Archives read-through is witnessing hubris destroying and wrecking more and more bits of the Doctor Who franchise every time John Nathan-Turner opens his mouth and drives away more Doctor Who actors, writers, budget planners.

-First mention of the TEENAGE NINJA MUTANT TURTLES comic book in the SFL Archives, the TNMT cartoon series most people are familiar with happened much later

-HARMONY GOLD. MACROSS SAGA. ROBOTECH. HARMONY GOLD. CAPTAIN HARLOCK. Waves of people chiming into add that Robotech is a mere bastardization of 3 different Japanese animation series. Harmony Gold seriously wants their Gold.

-New Robert Heinlein book "THE CAT WHO WALKED THROUGH WALLS" gets released and ties everything Heinlein has ever written closer together, which some Heinlein fans like and other people just groan about. Lazarus Long openly acting like the literal mother-fucking douchebag he is makes some of the Heinlein defense squad turn in their "I HEART EVERYTHING HEINLEIN" badges.

-A few SFL edgelords get offended by all the feminist SF being mentioned and start trolling the feminist SF discussion thread by confusing who is a female writer and claiming that GOR and Heinlein are peak feminist SF.

-Steven Brust quits his job that has ARPANET access to become a full-time writer. Farewell SKZB, I will not miss you.

-The 1985 AMAZING STORIES tv series, the 1980's TWILIGHT ZONE reboot, and 1980's Alfred Hitchcock Presents tv-serials all come out around the same time and get discussed heavily. Amazing Stories has amazing visuals but not so much amazing plots or storytelling. 2020 take: this was where Steven Spielberg encountered a rare setback in his career (cashing out on the Medal of Honor videogame series before it hit big was Spielberg's 2nd setback). It turns out producing tv movies under contract is hard, especially since John Landis fucked up everything regarding child-actors with the Twilight Zone movie and malicious negligence lawsuits.

-The SHAVER MYSTERY aka a variation of the HOLLOW EARTH CONSPIRACY THEORY gets mentioned in detail because Richard Shaver was a 1940s scifi writer.

-How to get published as a new SF&F writer part 3: a daisy wheel ink-cartridge worth of SFL self-doxxed authors chiming in to give advice, conflicting advice, overriding conflicting advice and patronizing humble brags.

-A proposal to put the SF-LOVERS mailing list onto microfiche to preserve it for future study. Pretty sure the NSA already has that covered for you, 1985 person.

-Stephen King/Richard Bachman stories get discussed more, THINNER is the latest Stephen King written book being discussed as 1985 closes out

-The variety of mono-sex societies in fiction. Either all female societies, or all male societies, maintained via cloning, artificial insemination, or physical separation after birth to all male/all female zones. Outside forces usually arrive and hijinks happen but not like the creepy shit Star Trek:TNG got up too.

-Greg Bear's past few books (EON, INFINITY CONCERTO, etc) haven't impressed anyone posting about them in the SFL in 1985 and some people wonder if Greg Bear has peaked already or just hit a very very rough spot in his career.

-The movie ENEMY MINE based on a novella of the same name comes out at the very end of 1985. One of STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION's best episodes, Darmok, "heavily" borrowed from Enemy Mine.

-"Do decompressing human bodies in outer space explode, implode or other"? discussion...2001 the movie is the main reference point for this discussion

-A insane seeming story about the last fertile man on Earth after a nuclear accident called MR ADAM by Pat Frank. This is how MR ADAM first got mentioned in the SFL

quote:

One of the secretaries here was talking about a book she read called
MR. ADAM. It was apparently written in the late 40's and concerned
a nuclear accident which left the male population of the earth
sterile, except for one man. As she explained it, the book
concerned the government's efforts at repopulation via this one man.

BTW, she said the book was hilarious. (Anyone with a pointer to
finding a copy?)

And that wraps up SFL Volume 10 summaries for me, at least regarding weird, bizarre, horrifying and retroactively interesting things in it.

originally posted September 2nd in the SomethingAwful forums Science Fiction Fantasy Megathread 3

SFL Archives Vol 08 readthrough update 02

 -Reading the SFL archives chat about SUNDIVER and STARTIDE RISING has softened my views on David Brin. The David Brin of 37 yrs/30 yrs/20 years ago is not the bitter boomer CHUD David Brin of 2019, clever and tolerant David Brin died off over a decade ago.

David Brin's Uplift universe stories are worth reading for the galactic species and Interstellar Universal Library concept in them. For a 2020 reader new to David Brin's Uplift stories, yes there is awkward interspecies sex scenes in each of the Uplift books that can/probably should be skipped over.. ....always skip the awkward interspecies sex scenes/sexual harassment scenes in Brin's Uplift universe stories. What's that?...... *high pitched clicking and squeaking*....... DolphinF**ker heavily disagrees with that last statement.

-first book of Roger Zelazny's new AMBER series gets teased for a 1984 release. Looking back at Zelazny's earlier Amber stories,and the wholesale stealing from Philip Jose Farmer's earlier series, am now thinking that the obvious "written for the money" Amber books mostly exist, ironically, as a way for Zelazny to pay off PJF and confuse people into thinking PJF ripped off Zelazny...which then leads to owing PJF another round of settlement money, etc

-Spider Robinson (mega-overrated) gets mentioned for the 872th time as a person of note in the SFF community that every serious SFF fan should be aware of. tldr summary of Spider Robinson: Robert Heinlein was Spider Robinson's God, and Spider Robinson fully embraced the Moses role.

-The mailing list moderator(BackStabMod) who did a hostile takeover of the SF-LOVERS Digest lasted a little over 15 months managing the SFL mailing list before giving up, claiming privacy right concerns (a la DolphinF**ker) with the ARPANET and the inability to manage future SF-LOVERS mailing list Digests if they have no future ARPANET access are the real reasons why they are stepping down as SF-LOVERS mod. BackStabMod's explanations about privacy concerns were unironically accompanied by lots and lots of personal details of BackStabMod's life and future plans.

-Rudy Rucker, 1980s mathematician and scifi author got discussed. Some of the people like RR's work simply because they incorporate mathematics into their stories, others dislike RR for the shoehorned-in mathematics and the kookiness factor in RR's stories. Regardlessly, I had never heard of THE SEX SPHERE By Rudy Rucker before, and really don't plan on reading it.

-Movie chat continued, with WARGAMES 1983 & the upcoming DUNE movie directed by David Lynch being frequent topics of discussion. Nightmares(?) the anthology horror film had a gamer-hell segment that seemed very VR goggles. A weird arthouse movie call LIQUID SKY got mentioned for it's scifi elements and unique take on exploitation/horror/scifi/drugs.

-For the 5th time or so in SFL archives history, someone asked for lists "SF&F Novels of Literary Merit", and then got pissy at the lack of responses/not enough people doing their homework slash PhD thesis research for them. Basic things like the request being a loaded question, the requestor obviously fishing for data for their PhD thesis on Science Fiction Novels of Literary Merit, and the responder requesting all survey answers being sent to a obscure location confused and angered people similar to Arthur Dent and the house demolition notice (It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying 'Beware of the Leopard'). Additionally defending the merit of SFF is a hill SFF Culture Warrior John S Quarterman is willing to die on (John Quarterman requested people get his name right when referring to him so I did).

-Somebodies worse SF novel they can ever recall reading is ARMADA by Michael Jahn, which I have done zero research on,and will probably forget about until the next time I go through my SFL archive Vol 08 bookmarks

-Probably only of interest to me and a select few others, but TRAVELLER RPG gets mentioned a few times and this allows me to mention without any hate in my soul additional filksong lyrics chat along with the 300+ odes or verses to a filk-song about "olde time religion" or something similar. I refuse to bookmark filk-chat so you'll have to dig through SFL Vol 08 yourself to find them

-Private space sector efforts vs government funded space sector SFL archives chat in 1983 aged badly given the 2019/2020 private space sector events

-SF vs Sci-fi vs skiffy. AKA a fans of Science Fiction culture war that boils down to (in 2020 terms) how you refer to Science-Fiction in short-hand terms(SF vs Sci-fi vs skiffy) defining your TRUE FAN STATUS versus other people/other Science Fiction fans.

-Big time DOCTOR WHO chat. Peter Davidson leaving the role so soon after Tom Baker, and American Public access tv repeating the Doctor Who serials more than Star Trek the Original Series got repeated has driven up the SFL Dr Who Chat intensity.

 To give some context, the Five Doctors special just came out, which skewed slightly into Douglas Adams chat when Douglas Adam's as a Dr Who writer came up. John Nathan-Turner has been mentioned multiple times promising many things to Doctor Who fans, of which zero point zero zero zero zero three promises will actually happen (the first person of color companion promise took an additional 34 f**king years to happen)

-EMPIRE OF THE PETAL THRONE, a D&D setting TSR abandoned in lieu of GREYHAWK, then FORGOTTEN REALMS, then MYSTARA, then FORGOTTEN REALMS (again) gets mentioned. Empire of the Petal Throne uses a hybrid China/Japan/Korea/India gameworld setting.

-On the topic of HITCHHIKERS GUIDE TO THE GALAXY, SFL chat was about how the books deviated from the original HHGTTG radio broadcasts and the followup BBC HHGTTG radio sequel programs. Finally Douglas Adams running out of tombstones to swear on while promising each HHGTTG sequel will be the "last one I swear" was the new SFL archives running joke (replacing the previous SFL running jokes of PAC-man puns and before that Indiana Jones sequel pun-names)

-Something called the unofficial Wizards and Warriors unathorized future history continuation has been hyped multiple times by one SFL poster. Suspecting that SFL postergot told to knock it off/stop hosting this on the ARPANET, because the last Wizards & Warriors hype pitch in SFL Vol 08 combines a "lost subscriber/please help me find them" with an acknowledgement of getting kicked off their former ARPANET/CSNet host

-Convention security run by SFF fans gets mentioned, with Robert Asprin of Myth/Thieves World/IRS back-taxes fame getting mentioned as the leader of the DORSAI IRREGULARS aka the Klingon Diplomatic Corps. Am pretty certain doing any kind of research into this group will involve cringe factors and discovering covered-up sexual assault

-MIT's Science Fiction Society slash private library gets mention-pimped in detail for the first time since 1980-1981. No idea if this exists currently or MIT cracked down on it. As I've said repeatedly before, I bookmark things of interest and very rarely look things up because there is so much stuff in the SFL Digest that if I took the time to look up everything mentioned, I would be much further behind in my SFL archive read-through.

-A post about "Death Star population = Imperial Cas" successfully predicts one of the events in "The Last Jedi" aka the hyperdrive suicide bombing.

originally posted July 31st in the SomethingAwful forums Science Fiction Fantasy Megathread 3

SFL Archives Vol 03 readthrough update 02

 In my recaps of reading the SFL archives, I tend to not mention: outdated science/physics chat, FTL travel vs STL chat, scifi tv series episode listings, topical scifi/fantasy movie reviews or topical scifi/fantasy book reviews, identify-this story for me requests, childrens tv programming of the 50's/60's/70's chat, religion debates, Hugo/Nebula award nominations + award winners chat, "what is the Force" debates?, and the many listings of upcoming global scifi conventions/results of just finished global scifi conventions.

-Vernor Vinge's age of cyberspace TRUE NAMES came out and was reviewed favorably by most SFL members. Douglas Adams 1st & 2nd HITCHHIKERS GUIDE TO THE GALAXY series books were released in the US, and had less favorable reviews. No one has really discussed Gene Wolfe's 1981 CLAW OF THE CONCILIATOR or 1980 BOOK OF THE NEW SUN so far, but things might change.

-Back in 1981, Lucas Films and NPR collaborated to make a radio drama out of STAR WARS: A New Hope the movie with Mark Hamill (which maybe kickstarted Hamill's prolific voice-acting career) & Anthony Daniels (C3PO), plus a bunch of ringers. As a moderate Star Wars fan, the existence of the 1981 Star Wars radio drama, and spoiler alert the existence of the other original SW trilogy radio dramas got memory-holed harder than David Proust, the body-actor of Darth Vader

-A profile of Ralph Bakshi, 1970s-80s cartoonist I mostly remember for the unsettling-blobby artwork in Bakshi's Lord of the Rings movies. Bakshi promoted his other animation efforts, including a movie about black America called....uh even posting the movie name will end in a probe so just look it up yourself or if that's too much effort, think of the "badly aged Eric Cartman super-hero persona" and uh make it more racist.

e: I was remembering the unsettling and blobbly artwork from Rankin/Bass animatted movie efforts like the HOBBIT 1977, not Bakshi's work.

-Larry Niven's DOWN IN FLAMES, the 1968/1977 unofficial abandoned conclusion to the Known Space/Ringworld series finally got described in detail Everything you know about the Known Space setting is a hoax. Down in Flames discussion was interesting enough that I read it myself, and no bullshit it is better than everything Niven proceeded to write about the Ringworld and Known Space setting for the next 8 books.

If you do choose to see Down in Flames as Known Space/Ringworld canon, you can safely abandon the Ringworld series after the 1st Ringworld book aka Ringworld 1970, while the remaining Known Space stories written after 1978 sort-of fit if you don't think too hard about timedates. 

-biology chat becomes the running topic of the fortnight, with DNA encoding, scifi stories about DNA encoding, goats=unicorns (which I will come back to), etc

-MENSA membership gets pimped in the SFL for the first time I can remember. The MENSA membership ad gets a faint sneery tone when mentioning alternate methods of qualifying for MENSA membership (combined SAT results or combined GRE results over certain scores will get you in under limited membership status)

-DolphinF**cker is against proposals for "permanent" assignation of phone numbers to people, for *wink* privacy reasons. *wink*

-the SFL liveposted the first manned Space Shuttle launch attempt on April 10 1981. Keyword being: attempt.

-A reposted article from the Baltimore Sun newspaper brings the 1st mention of space borne telescopes into the SFL archives. These space borne telescopes (due to be launched in 1985) will have sensors/cameras that might be able to detect extrasolar planets. 

(2020 sidenote: those extrasolar planet detecting methods mentioned in the article are still being fine-tuned today/2020 time period.)

-SPECIES movie fans will find Fred Hoyle's 1975 novel A FOR ANDROMEDA uses an eerily similar setup, but Hoyle's book series fails to implement H.R. Giger and instead goes with a deep-state conspiracy.

-the goats=unicorns thing.

Someone I didn't bother bookmarking posted about recent studies of medieval documents/myth had lead to scholars thinking that references to unicorn were really references to one-horned goats. Chapman.ES promotes his friend from the Berkeley area named Morning Glory who showed off a unicorn-goat named Lancelot at the February 1981 Berkeley Fantasy Worlds Convention. When asked about Lancelot the goat-unicorn, Chapman.ES said that Morning Glory and her husband mentioned a careful breeding plan that two years ago resulted in Lancelot. Additionally......something akin to Bonsai helped out, but Morning Glory couldn't go into more details because they were trying to patent the process.

(emphasis mine)

People replied back to Chapman.ES mentioning common farm practices of de-horning livestock. And then other people ran with that and suggested maybe two goat horns got fused together in Lancelot's case, or maybe shortly after birth, one horn got removed totally with the other horn bud moved/shifted over. Chapman.ES flipped the fuck out and went full "I take exception to your slur upon Morning Glory and her husband, and your suggestion that they are charlatans. These are sincere people, who are into mysticism, it is true, but just because you don't agree with their world view doesn't mean you have to insult them."....and so on for another 70-90 lines.

-Didn't think I'd find something to top Bakshi's hyper badly aged 'black america in the south' animated movie within less than 24 hrs, however someone in the SFL mentioned that H Beam Piper's LITTLE FUZZY was ripping off a earlier story.....and they weren't making things up.

A semi-famous World War 2 french resistance member slash author wrote "LES ANIMAUX DENATURES" or "YOU SHALL KNOW THEM" in it's english language translation.

story recap: tribes of "missing link" hominids are found in the jungles of new guinea, and exploited as an cheap workforce similar to "war with the newts". Scientist-perverts or just normal perverts discover that the missing link hominids <ugh> can get pregnant with <ugh> human sperm <quadruple ugh>. One of the scientist-perverts impregnates a missing link hominid with his sperm then kills the baby once it is born; under the reasoning that the ensuing trial will determine if the missing link hominids are human (and therefore deserve human rights) or not.

Adding to the weirdness/wtf factor, a Burt Reynolds movie called SKULLDUGGERY is a loose adaption of "les animaux denatures". 

originally posted between July 1st- July 3rd in the SomethingAwful forums Science Fiction Fantasy Megathread 3