SFL Archives Vol 14 readthrough update 02

SFL Archives Vol 14

7.5 mb raw text file

100% completion, 104 book marks

-The 1989 Aprils Fool gimmick for the SFL Archives was that there was SFL Digests sent out the week leading up to  April Fools 1989 and for a few days after. AKA No April Fools jok posts allowed in the SF-LOVERS mailing list for 1989.

1989 technology references: Vacuum welding and the real-world feasiblity of Larry Niven Known Space style mono-molecule weapons/devices.

-STAR TREK 5, BATMAN 1989 & James Cameron's THE ABYSS come out. Batman 1989 & The Abyss break brains across the SFL, while ST5 is mostly discussed for the climbing anti-gravity boots & most of the TOS cast acting out-of-character. Peter Jackson's 1989 movie BAD TASTE also gets briefly discussed.

-BATMAN 1989 breaks SFL brains by being unlike the Adam West tv series, unlike the Frank Miller Dark Knight comic series, and by starring Michael Keaton, and Jack Nicholson. The Batcave and how it exists, the Batmobile and Batplane, the heavily armored Batsuit, Bruce Wayne acting weird, The Joker's murderous gadgets,and Batman being a Ninja.

(2020 note: One SFLer made a series of posts so angry and detailed and emphatic about Batman being a Ninja that I now refer to them as NinjaExpert)

-James Cameron's THE ABYSS breaks brains in a more technical way, every third SFL Digest sent between July 1989 - early August 1989 was dedicated to the ABYSS discussion. SFLer hating the various actors, anger at SEALs not doing that in real life, Inconsistencies between the movie and the novelization, aliens, alien cities, scuba, deep sea O2 breathing mixes, and ASCII flowcharts of how diving regulators work, and a whole bunch more. 

-First mention of Iain M Banks CONSIDER PHLEBAS, then discussion of Iain Banks non SF books like WASP FACTORY, etc.

-First appearance of STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION BORG chat.

-Sting the musician-actor's non-DUNE movie acting work.

-One or two SFLer's think John Brunner borrowed the framing device of STAND On ZANZIBAR from John Dos Passos trilogy "USA".

-First rumors of a live action JUDGE DREDD movie, with Sylvester Stallone rumored to be in the Judge Dredd role. 

(2020 note: 1989 SFLer's scoff at that idea, but....yeah. It was real, all of it.)

-Novelization of the Infocom game PLANETFALL gets one positive review.

-The Heinlein Defense Squad tries comparing Robert Anson Heinlein positively to Sir James Burton, but no-one takes the bait.

-The SFWA white knight SFL poster finally and conclusively outs themselves as editor of the fanzine OTHER REALMS, which now explains all the sucking up/worshipful references to SF&F authors, and snitching on any negative to the SFWA/anyone with editorship roles in the SF&F genres. 

-Franchised out SF universes, such as Asimov's Robot City and Roger Zelazny's "Clypsis" series, all of which SFLers are certain will still be discussed/still be published 20 years down the road.

(2020 note: Yeah, that didn't happen. I think 99% of the mentioned franchised out SF universes died out within 18 months of SFL this discussion.)

-A 1989 READERCON flyer describes Samuel R Delany as the "Woody Allen of SF". This comparison aged extremely badly or extremely well depending on how you view Woody Allen & Samuel R Delany.

-A SFLer outs their fetish, TWICE, for Jack Chalker type fantasies where shape changing/physical transformation  and body swapping are key parts of the story.

-SFLer's appreciating when authors put in the work to research the topics they write about in their stories (William R. Forstchen being part of a medieval reenactment catapult crew gets mentioned).

-SFLer's discuss the Penny Farthing bicycle explanation that only happened in the "lost" THE PRISONER episode

-Bad Technology in SF story discussion (Battlestar Galactica, Star Trek, Niven Known Space, etc).

-News that 1980's TV series BEAUTY & THE BEAST starring Linda Hamilton & Ron Perlman is cancelled/not getting renewed on CBS. Meanwhile the ALIEN NATION tv series & QUANTUM LEAP both premiere to mostly positive SFL reaction, and FRIDAY THE 13TH: THE TV series finally gets discussed as the final episodes of it air.

-WorldCon 1989 happens, all of the extended drama over 1989 Hugo Award illegal vote counting is quickly ignored once the physical awards come out.

-Arthurian Mythos discussion crops up again for 6 or so SFL Digests. More reference materials & lists of Arthurian Mythos works get posted.

-Daniel Keys Moran and his threatened thirty three novel series TALES OF THE CONTINUING TIME discussion.

-The Suicide of a West German Hacker involved in hacking a bunch of US government servers/sites gets a brief mention.

(2020 note: The dead hacker, Karl Koch, was one of "stars" or featured people in Cliff Stohl's mostly non-fictional CUCKOOS EGG which discussed how the hackers were detected and how the hackers were eventually arrested.)

-Portage cost for open parties at the Worldcon 1989 hotels got some SFL outrage. So did the SF-LOVERS mailing list getting a unofficial WorldCon (non-Hugo Award), however the biggest thing was very negative reactions to a female author only award being announced/premiered during the 1989 Hugo Awards ceremony.  

-The Willimantic CT book publisher (Zeiss Press?)  that specialized in Gene Wolfe small press runs moves across country to California in July 1989

-The Denver Post newspaper announces a  new Science Fiction themed cable network television channel, to be called the SCI-FI CHANNEL

-An SFLer with way too much time on their hands did a A-Z index listing for everything in the (as of 1989) 4 book series HITCHHIKERS GUIDE TO THE GALAXY by Douglas Adams.

-Another year passes and another solitary SFL question asking if anyone, anyone at all knows if MORIGU: THE DESECRATION by Mark C Perry has a sequel. 

-Dan Simmon's HYPERION, 1st book of William Shatner's TEKWAR series, WAITING FOR THE GALACTIC BUS & it's sequel THE SNAKE OIL WARS, WARDAY, THE ETERNITY BRIGADE, COLD COMFORT FARM, and ACROSS THE COSMOS being supposedly being plagiarized twice by the same person/sold to two different publishers.

-The 1989 version of BACK TO THE FUTURE series discussion focuses on Biff, and the Biff's various timelines, and BACK TO THE FUTURE 3.

-TOR Books doing a total recall & replace on Walter Jon Williams novel ANGEL STATION because of non-existent quality control.

-Fantasy and Science Fiction stories with music or musicians as core pieces of the story.

-Pop Culture Vampire & Werewolf Lore, and how to stop/cause Vampire & Werewolf outbreaks discussion.

-Request for advice on long term storage of Books in a warehouse/self-storage facility.

-1989 version of Matter transportation discussion: What is the Earliest Matter Transportation story in existence?

-A DIANE DUANE identity thief-impersonator-imposter has re-appeared and is active in the U.S.A. after a decade long break/prison time.

-The very first SFL Archives mention of BABYLON 5,the tv series about 2 years before I expected it.

------------------------------

Date: 3 Oct 89 19:56:57 GMT

From: jas@isi.edu (Jeff Sullivan)

Subject: Re: ALIEN NATION - Just another cop series.

J. Michael Straczynski is trying to package a SF series of his called

"Babylon 5."  He says that it will do for SF on TV what Hill Street did for

Cop stories.

We'll see.  He says the financing is almost locked, and it should air next

fall.

Jeffrey A. Sullivan

Senior Systems Programmer

Information Sciences Institute

University of Southern California

jas@venera.isi.edu

jas@isi.edu

------------------------------

SFL Archives Vol 11 readthrough update 02

Current status: 15% completion in SFL Archives Vol 11, 48 bookmarks. 

-David Eddings apparently ripping off Lloyd Alexander's PRYDIAN series wholesale gets brought up a multiple times by different SFLers using variants of this quoted post:

"I read -and enjoyed- the Belgariad, but

it was an almost exact copy of another five book series, the Prydain

series by Lloyd Alexander (The Book of Three, The Black Cauldron,

The Castle of Llyr, Taran Wanderer, and The High King), up to and

including stubborn red-haired princess!  If I were Lloyd Alexander,

I would have filed for copyright infringement!"

-Talk of scifi & fantasy stories built around time-travel and astrally projected main characters brings up a weird fantasy-slash SciFi story that turns out to be THE NIGHT LAND by William Hope Hodgson (2020 readers: be prepared for lots of repetition and filler text involving the main character eating and drinking and sleeping and eating and drinking and sleeping and eating and sleeping and drinking).

-A SFL Archives post about asking if voice actors that read the SFL mailing are willing to share their work experiences is notable mainly because the person making the request cross-posted it to net.sf-lovers, net.startrek and net.movies

-Jean M. Auel's corpus of work comes up as does her writing one-handed fixation on writing in caveman harlequin romance plots into them.

-SFLers try decoding the alliterative names used to insert other fantasy genre and scifi genres authors in your lighter stories that was the de rigueur thing to do for a while in the 1970's-80's

-Someone recommends Spider Robinson's NIGHT OF POWER for it's inclusion of and I quote "touches on (and occasionally fondles) prostitution, rape, pubescents, adultery, and (gasp) miscegenation."  (2020 readers: These themes crop up in almost EVERY Spider Robinson story I've come across in my "give Spider Robinson a 2nd chance re-read attempt.) 

-The 1985 Controller of BBC 1 explains why the DOCTOR WHO series briefly went on hiatus for ""(being) too violent, plots had become boring and repetitive" reasons, and threatened total Doctor Who series cancellation if the show ratings did not improve.

-L Ron Hubbard dies at a undisclosed location sometime in early 1986, Zenna Henderson death notice.

-Timothy Zahn's COBRA series comes up and gets very mixed to extremely negative reviews. Wondering how much COBRA series content got recycled into Zahn's much better well known STAR WARS EU stories?  

-1st mention of iconic children's cartoon VOLTRON in the SFL Archives. 

-George RR Martin's HAVILAND TUF short stories gets brought up a few times. They sound interesting but I am not dropping my "NEVER READ GEORGE RR MARTIN STORIES" rule

-A Feb 19th 1986 LA TIMES article mentioned how a bunch of local SF writers got together after the Voyager 2 spaceprobe did a flyby of Uranus and started getting very notMad about a Harpers Magazine article called "THE TEMPLE OF BOREDOM" by Luc Sante.

-Someone tries to revive (and commercialize) the SF-LOVERS t-shirt SFL subscribers used to lowkey identify each other at Fantasy and SciFi conventions...aka the thing Robert Forwards edgelord son designed back in late 1980

-The SPACE MERCHANTS series by Fredrick Pohl & Cyril M. Kornbluth gets brought up by 1986 SFLers as a 1984-the-book warning of how bad things could get in the future (2020 take: they had no idea)

-R. Ramsay takes self-promotion to a new stage in the SFL Archives and self-publishes their "best (SF) short story" to the SFL mailing list. (2020: I powerskimmed it and uh.... 'Sam Spade written by William Gibson' is how I would describe it) 

-Someone scoops the on-site location shooting for STAR TREK 4 regarding DeForrest Kelly at a local 20th century hospital

 -Hank Buurman discloses the survey responses he got for "posting on female sexuality in sf/fantasy" in the SFL mailing list. Hank Buurman did get ot a lot of responses, but the responses Hank Buurman received were thoughtful and full of details. Since no one requested anonymity, Hank Buurman includes the login names/email addresses of the people who responded next to extracts of their posts. Since Hank Buurman didn't feel anonymity was cool for people, I returned the favor in kind.

-Excerpts from the HARPERS MAGAZINE article "THE TEMPLE OF BOREDOM" mentioned earlier get re-posted to the SFL Archives. Without the full essay to read....the excerpts given just ramble from topic to topic <rimshot burn on my SFL Archives readthrough in a nutshell I guess> 

-The benefits of subscribing to Locus Magazine for the low low cost of only $24 per year *in 1986 money valuation* Not sure what has changed regarding the Locus Magazine of the 1980s vs the Locus Magazine of modern times (2020 guess: it went digital and costs more is my uneducated, not looking things up at all guess)  

-A "Secular Humanist Revival" panel hosted by Orson Scott Card at the upcoming INCONJUNCTION 6 in July 1986 gets teased.

-Book publishers always seeming to finally publish all the stories and books of authors they could never manage to do when the author was alive...this time it's Philip K Dick getting the post-mortem career boost.

-SIME/GEN Householding and whatever the hell it is comes up a few times. Channels, Rensimes, Companions, Gens, and Sosectu's are name-dropped. Guessing Sime/Gen is some version of pre-Internet LARPing

-TRAVELLER RPG comes up again, with requests for interstellar merchant fiction. GRRM's Haviland Tuf gets recommended again, and my love of the TRAVELLER RPG makes me break my "NEVER READ GEORGE RR MARTIN STORIES" rule and add the Haviland Tuf stories to my reading list. <damn it>

-James Blish's CITIES IN SPACE series also gets recommended to the TRAVELLER RPG fan, however I have read those Cities in Space stories and they are exactly as hypocritical as everything involving 1980's televangelists & money/adultery.

-HIGHLANDER 1 gets released, it rocks, and Sean Connery hits the "kissing on the lips costs more" uh "non-Scottish accents cost more" phase of his acting career

-The "Why do producers keep remaking successful films every couple of decades?" question comes up, and SFLers start mentioning various 1970's-1980's film remakes.

-A small publishing house based in Willimantic CT that seemingly specialized in doing limited publication small print runs of Gene Wolfe books has come up in the SFL Archives over and over again since 1981/1982. *HINT* Given the printing press technology level back then, suspect that Gene Wolfe mega-fan collectors might be able to score physical offset printing plates of Gene Wolfe's work if they contacted that publisher/the estate of the publisher. *HINT*

-KLAATU BARADA NICOTINE: A SFLer makes the observation of how in THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL 1951 movie, doctors were smoking heavily when discussing that Klaatu the alien ambassador somehow has a longer lifespan than Earth humans. HMMMM.

-One of the ultimate blue-collar Scifi book series comes up again, STAR RIGGERS by John DeChancie. Despite the subject matter <interstellar Big-BIG RIG trucker> and the wish-fullfilment factors in them, the Star Riggers series isn't terrible.

-April Fools jokes, 1986 edition 

-Judy-Lynn del Rey obituary notice. Judy-Lynn del Rey is mostly forgotten by modern SF fans, however Judy-Lynn del Rey is the person most responsible for dragging Science Fiction out of the sub-sub-genre slums and making SF more accessible to readers of all gamuts and backgrounds. RIP Judy-Lynn del Rey.

-EE Smith's in-novel solution to handling a Grand Fleet of a million spaceships: A large display tank and 200 four-armed telephone switch operators.

-Mark Leeper expands on why he thinks the 1975 BBC tv series THE SURVIVORS is one of the best SciFi series out there (2020 note: the 1975 version of THE SURVIVORS predicts a lot of things that went down in real life re: COVID19)     

-A few SFL people want to know WTF(and how playable IRL) the FENCE game in John Brunner's SHOCKWAVE RIDER is. (2020 take: Now I do too, damnit.)

-Someone finds it impossible to find slack time in the LOTR series if actual movies were made of the LOTR books  (2020 take: Peter Jackson laughs and laughs and laughs and laughs as Tidus from Final Fantasy X chimes in)

-SFLers notice a slew of typographical errors in the books that have been coming out lately. DAW usually comes up regarding this subject. (2020 take: Cutting back on copy-editors is usually a sign that book publishers are in trouble. DAW doesn't exist anymore (or does it?). Coincidence?) 

-THIEVES WORLD series comes up again. Essentially a shared universe for fantasy genre writers, with near free reign for the involved authors to f**k with other authors characters/plots. George RR Martin would adopt a similar method for his most-beloved series, the WILD CARDS setting.

-SKYCAM technology gets mentioned for 1st time or so in the SFL Archives. One SFLer thinks the first movie to use SKYCAM technology was the opening scene in HIGHLANDER 1(1986), while another SFLer thinks it was used in All the Right Moves(?)

-Exponential expansion of the ARPANET/other connected pre-Internet networks and how it all relates scarily to Algis Budrys's 1976 story MICHAELMAS.

-Someone reviews Jack Dann's THE MAN WHO MELTED, and comments that the book revolves around every character having severe psychological problems and Scream therapy being (the cause of?/the solution to?) the central mystery of the book. 

-Some deranged person wants links to the 13 episodes of HitchHikers Guide to the Net previously posted to the 1984 SFL Archives, and I hate them for bringing that hell back on me.

-The SFL Archives mailing list moderator-maintainer posts on 11 Apr 86:

Well, here it is almost 10 days after the beginning of April

and guess what?  I am *still* getting messages from people asking

about the new subscription charges announced in the April 1 edition

(Vol 11, #59) of SF-LOVERS.  For those of you who haven't gotten it

by now, that was the April Fool's issue.  I guess the issue was much

more subtle than I thought it was or else people were confused by

the fact that they received the issue after April 1.  Can you say

"slow mailers and lousy hardware"?  I thought so.  It seems we were

off the network for a few days and that delayed transmission of the

digest even though it was prepared far enough in advance.

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