SFL Archives Vol 13 readthrough update 01

SFL Archives Vol 13

5.9 mb raw text file

15% completion, 25 bookmarks

-1988 technology level: MS-DOS 2.21, COMPUSERVE, dual floppy disks, monochrome monitors, Leading Edge Word Processor software. The SF-LOVERS mailing list has migrated to new hardware and now there is dedicated @EDU email addresses for SF-LOVERS mailing list submissions & SF-LOVERS administrative questions.

-SFL 1988 Pop-culture mentions: TRANSFORMERS, MY LITTLE PONY, and SMURFS cartoon series. Disney children's movie THE POINT. COLES regional bookstores. First mention of author Jo Clayton.

-1988 starts off with heavy Stephen R Donaldson and his THOMAS COVENANT series discussion, with both sides talking past each other loudly. One side is extremely angry about people dissing Donaldson's writing style/hating on the Thomas Covenant series, and the other side keeps explaining exactly why they diss Donaldson's writing style and why they hate Thomas Covenant the character/the book series.

-Poul Anderson explaining how he came up with his YS stories, Larry Niven clarifying the background of the main character in his RINGWORLD series (Louis Wu is not related to Beowulf Shaeffer or Carlos Wu).

-January 13 1988: Brian Herbert starts the rumor that he will be writing the 7th DUNE novel, and that he has more notes that his father, Frank Herbert, wrote regarding the 7th DUNE novel.

-First mention of Jack Vance's CADWAL CHRONICLES stories in the SFL Archives.

(2020 note: Almost all of the standard Jack Vance tropes apply to the Cadwal Chronicles stories. The big twist for the Cadwal stories is that the "good guys" are thinly disguised white South Afrikaners enforcing apartheid rule over the palette swapped black people that do everything in South Africa on the planet Cadwal.)

-Private investigators or just really creepy people glom onto the "Using Social Media to doxx people" concept, and start making a few of those requests to the SF-LOVERS mailing list.

-An anecdote of Marion Zimmer Bradley redacting a goofly dated "human slide-rule"/"Galactic alien slide rule" string of dialogue comparison in reprints of her earlier story THE BRASS DRAGON. 

-Richard Lupoff aka Dick Lupoff is interviewed/gives feedback to comments made about him to the SF-LOVERS mailing list. Lupoff's interview takes up an entire SFL Digest, and covers upcoming projects/stories due to be published, the terribleness of dealing with Philip Jose Farmer properties, what kind of computer Lupoff uses, Lupoff's 1st job in computing, and how Lupoff tries to highlight hypocrisy in his stories with a weird side-comment about what THE SACRED LOCOMOTIVE FLIES is really about (something about future airlines switching to 100% naked stewardess-prostitutes in the near future.)  

-Suzette Hayden Elgin's OZARK stories, PORTAL (Rob Swigart), PELBAR CYCLE (Paul O. Williams), FOLK OF THE AIR (Peter Beagle), COUNTERFEIT WORLD (Daniel F. Galouyle), Craig Shaw Gardner EBENEZUM & WUNTVOR trilogies, LIEGE KILLER (Christopher Hinz), TOMMYKNOCKERS (Stephen King), ONE HUMAN MINUTE & A PERFECT VACUUM (Stanislaw Lem), REALITY MATRIX (John Dalmas).

-A standard seeming recommendation for Mercedes Lackey's existing stories and her upcoming stories get weird when the SFLer making the recommendation keeps referring to Lackey as 'Misty', which knowing nothing about Mercedes Lackey implies heavy previous contact with Lackey.

-Oddball SF&F story request: A SFLer wants recommendations for any F&SF story which occurs in the Southern temperate zone of an alien planet. AKA "when the people go south, it gets colder rather than warmer". 

-The time that Arthur C Clarke & Isaac Asimov formed a self-appreciation society of two back in the 1950's with declaring each other and themselves the 1st & 2nd best writers in the fields of Science Fiction writing and Science Fact writing.

-6 years after it came out, the movie BLADERUNNER 1982 is now considered prescient and worthy of discussion in the SFL Archives. SFLer's are confused by the plot, the differences in the Philip K Dick story vs the movie, golden eye glows due to replicant-status? or just byproducts of the lighting effects used to film Bladerunner 1982?, etc.

-The (long anticipated by me) FLYING CAR debate finally kicks off in the SFL Archives.

(2020 note: One of the truly surprising things in the SFL Archives readthrough is that it took over 9 years to finally get around to discussing flying cars, which are a common element in SciFi stories of the 1930's - 1970's.) 

-SFL Mark Leeper creates a ASCII flowchart of Zombie movies trying to explain the George Romero & John Russo Zombie movies.

-Oddball 1988 SFLer movie & book request: Any SciFi movies/books made within the past 25 years or so that were made in Spanish. That is no Spanish subtitles, or Spanish language translations of existing books.

-Press release announcement for the upcoming GAYLAXICON 1988. GAYLAXICON 1988 is "a relaxacon/minicon for Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual Science Fiction Fans and their Friends." No dealers room, or art shows; limited attendance/hotel registration required for attendance.

-A unknown title/author SciFi story where a spaceship going at 99.9999% the speed of light passes through the Solar System, and the relativistic mass effect of that spaceship's speed somehow causes the Earth to suddenly move 10 feet North, and all the effect it has on humans/human environments globally.

 (2020 note: This story sounds amazingly bad.)

SFL Archives Vol 01 readthrough update 02

 SFL Archives Vol 01 42% completion

-Both Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle make the humble-brag claim at a 1980 MIT lecture called "How to get Rich Quick" that "they, and many other experienced authors write without editing their work" (DGSHARP@MIT-AI 02-13-1980). Robert Forward chimed in a few days later to "clarify" Niven and Pournelle's statements  about the  "never editing" or revising their work statements that Niven and Pournelle made at that 1980 MIT Lecture. Robert Forward tosses in the humble-brag of  (literal quote from Robert Forward)"Poul Anderson and me both agonize over each word at least 6 or 8 times before the final draft is sent into the publishers." 

-An early collaborative fantasy-scifi world setting called Darkover keeps getting mentioned over and over again in the SF-LOVERS. However, this is one of the things that have aged super badly because Marion Zimmer Bradley was a major contributor to the Darkover series...and keeps getting praised for writing strong female characters in the Darkover stories. Ughh.

-During discussion of black main characters, SALawrence@MIT-Multics brought up Richard Lupoff's novel THE SACRED LOCOMOTIVE FLIES because of it's sheer weirdness. The Sacred Locomotive Flies had a white main character but almost everyone else in the book was secretly black and appeared to be white-people by taking a weird drug that changed their skin color and also made them obese as a side-effect. This book sounds weird enough that I've added it to my "try to find it" list

-More retroactively weird Star Wars stuff. Fanzines named BANTHA TRACKS (great user name btw) and ALDERAAN. One on one interviews with David Prouse, the body-actor actively erased from Star Wars by Lucas and Disney. Bootleg SW character themes & SW themed albums before John Williams scores became the default Star Wars sound.

-Richard Stallman (RMS@MIT-AI) just popped up on the SF-LOVERS mailing list for the first time ever. Noticed it was him from the EMACS humblebrag and the omnipresent RMS handle. Just checked, RMS only posted 3 times in the Vol 01 SF-LOVERS Digest. 2nd time was debating about Darth Vader really being Luke's father and 3rd time was to nitpick a core piece of Robert Forward's novel Dragons Egg.

-Mentioning Philip Jose Farmer ripping off Roger Zelazny brought some feedback.

SomethingAful user jng2058 posted on June 20, 2020:

   That's a pretty harsh mischaracterization of what went on. I'm holding a third printing of Sign of the Unicorn and it's dedication is "For Jadawin and his Demiurge, not to forget Kickaha." Those being the main characters of "The World of Tiers," of course. You don't dedicate your book to the characters of a novel series you're homaging if you're worried they're going to sue you. For that matter, outside the barest of story beats of "dude on Earth encounters people of great power and then discovers he's one of those people afflicted with amnesia", the stories diverge pretty quickly.

    And it's not like you can sue over general story points anyhow, or else there'd be no end to the lawsuits between "guy with gun shoots a lot of bad guys" authors. Fer f*ck's sake, Paolini's Inheritance Cycle is just Star Wars with Dragons, with the movie for Eragon being even more so, and no one ever sued about that shit, and those are multi-billion dollar corporations with lawyers on staff whose job is to sue over shit like that.

    Perhaps most importantly we should remember that "good authors borrow, great authors steal." Whether you think Amber "sucked and was derivative" or not, the books were very popular and most people here know what you're talking about when you mention them, and a good percentage of us have read them. Far fewer have so much as heard of "The World of Tiers", much less seen a copy to read. Taking an existing story and transforming it and improving it such that no one remembers the original is the mark of a great writer.

    Unless you think Shakespeare adapting the lives of an obscure Danish prince and a thane of Scotland into two of the greatest tragedies in the English language was "derivative". :rolleyes:

My SomethingAwful forums response to jng2058:

Calm the f**k down.

Or get mad at AQE@MIT-MC and their 03-19-1980 post "Re: Similarities between "World of Tiers" and "Amber" which I quoted.

Lots of people in this thread and the previous SF&F mega-thread have commented that Zelazny's Amber series isn't the greatest and was at best written for the paycheck.

Originally posted Jun 20, 2020 18:15 on the SomethingAwful forums Book Barn Science Fiction Fantasy Megathread 3 thread