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.
