Here are six developments of interest to fans:

(1) The New York Times ran an obituary for pioneer Trek fan Joan Winston quoting other equally historic fan personalities:

“Most of us belonged to the Lunarians, a science fiction club, and we attended Lunacon, their convention, but there was a sense that ‘Star Trek’ fans were not real sci-fi fans,” said Devra Langsam, a fellow organizer of the first “Star Trek” convention and the editor of Spockanalia, the first “Star Trek” fanzine.

Elyse Pines, a friend of Ms. Langsam’s, proposed a gathering specifically for “Star Trek” fans. A mutual friend brought in Ms. Winston, who used her show business contacts to secure tapes of 15 “Star Trek” episodes, a blooper reel and the presence of Roddenberry. She also requested a few moon rocks from NASA.

“I just assumed that a day or two before the event the mailman would bring us a little postal package full of moon rocks,” she later told Mr. Shatner. Instead, NASA dispatched a trailer truck with two tons of memorabilia that included a genuine spacesuit stuffed with a mannequin astronaut.

(2) Ursula LeGuin and Shaun Tan will be among the authors present for the Vancouver International Writers and Readers Festival, October 21-26.

(3) Haven’t got your fill of articles about the doomed book publishing business? Look no farther than the recent issue of New York Magazine and a piece titled “The End“:

The book business as we know it will not be living happily ever after. With sales stagnating, CEO heads rolling, big-name authors playing musical chairs, and Amazon looming as the new boogeyman, publishing might have to look for its future outside the corporate world…

“What I’ve heard from editors is, ‘My judgment doesn’t count any longer’ … There used to be a reason to get into publishing… Whether they know it or not, they all want to be Maxwell Perkins. It’s a kind of secondary immortality. They didn’t flock to publishing because they want to publish Danielle Steel.”
– Kent Carroll, formerly of Carroll & Graf, now running Europa Editions.

“[Book trailers are] all the rage right now, but I would love to see an example of one video that really did generate a lot of sales. There’s a sense of desperation.”
– Bloomsbury’s Peter Miller

(4) Here’s a link to a touching article in the LA Times about Greg Lintner, the IRS employee killed in the Metrolink crash on September 12.

(5) Mary Reed and Eric Mayer’s interesting posts about their mystery writing appear at Business-Online-Info. There I also found this link to an excellent new interview with them that poses some very creative questions.

(6) Leonard Nimoy appeared on the September 20 edition of NPR’s “Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me“, playing their game called “You’re not that Spock, either” which required him to answer three questions about the expertise of Dr. Spock, child-rearing. (The link is to a menu of the show’s various segments.)

[Includes links courtesy of John Mansfield and Andrew Porter.]