Category Archives: Sercon

SF Encyclopedia Gallery

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The Science Fiction Encylopedia opened an online gallery on May 15 stocked with 1,837 book covers (and more to come.)

The contents are searchable by author, title keyword, illustrator and publisher. They can also be displayed as a slide show, or retrieved at random by clicking on  Lucky Dip.

Readers can participate in the upgrade and expansion of the gallery –

Some important Gallery pictures are smaller than we’d prefer. Ideally all portrait-format images should be 600 pixels wide, but those of the following first editions and of several others are only 350 pixels wide. We welcome larger scans of copies in good condition, and will of course give credit to anyone who can provide one – a new scan from your own or a willing friend’s collection, please, not online images which may be entangled in copyright issues.

Here is a wish list of items the editors have already identified for improvement:

Anthony Burgess – A Clockwork Orange
Arthur C Clarke – Childhood’s End
Frank Herbert – Dune
A Merritt – The Face in the Abyss
James H Schmitz – The Witches of Karres

If you can help, please use the SFE email contact form.

[Via Ansible Links, courtesy of John King Tarpinian.]

Clarke Center Lifts Off With Public Events

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The Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination will launch this month with a series of free events on the UC San Diego campus. 

May 1 through 31, 2013

“Remembering Sir Arthur C. Clarke”
Remembering and celebrating the diverse genius and joie de vivre of Sir Arthur C. Clarke. Artifacts and items are from the collection of Wayne and Gloria Houser. During the May 21 reception only: Special display of original paintings of Clarke book cover art on loan from Naomi Fisher, and space science posters by Jon Lomberg. Curated by Carol Hobson, and co-sponsored by the UC San Diego Library.
Seuss Room Foyer, Geisel Library, UC San Diego

Tuesday, May 14, 2013

1-5 p.m., “Visions of the Future”
An afternoon of conversations and presentations featuring Clarke Center affiliates on their visions of science and culture 33 years into the future (in honor of Clarke’s imagining of 2001 in 1968).
Calit2 Auditorium, Atkinson Hall, Qualcomm Institute, UC San Diego

7 p.m., “The Literary Imagination”
A conversation between authors Jonathan Lethem and Kim Stanley Robinson presented by the Helen Edison Lecture Series, UC San Diego Extension and the Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination
Price Center West Ballroom, UC San Diego

Tuesday and Wednesday, May 21 and 22, 2013

“Starship Century Symposium”
A two-day event devoted to an ongoing exploration of the development of a starship in the next 100 years. Scientists will address the challenges and opportunities for our long?term future in space, with possibilities envisioned by Freeman Dyson, Paul Davies, Peter Schwartz, John Cramer and Robert Zubrin. Science fiction authors Neal Stephenson, Allen Steele, Joe Haldeman, Gregory Benford, Geoffrey Landis and David Brin will discuss the implications that these trajectories of exploration might have upon our development as individuals and as a civilization.
Calit2 Auditorium, Atkinson Hall, Qualcomm Institute, UC San Diego
Note: Seating is limited, but the two-day event will be offered via live streaming video at http://imagination.ucsd.edu.

Tuesday, May 21, 2013

Reception 6-8 p.m., “Remembering Sir Arthur C. Clarke”
Remembering and celebrating the diverse genius and joie de vivre of Sir Arthur C. Clarke. Artifacts and items are from the collection of Wayne and Gloria Houser. During the May 21 reception only: Special display of original paintings of Clarke book cover art on loan from Naomi Fisher, and space science posters by Jon Lomberg. Also screening of documentary film, “Arthur C. Clarke: The Man Who Saw the Future,” a BBC/NVC ARTS Co-Production in association with RAI Thematic Channels, 1997. Curated by Carol Hobson, and co-sponsored by the UC San Diego Library.
Seuss Room Foyer, Geisel Library, UC San Diego

Created by UCSD and the Arthur C. Clarke Foundation, the Clarke Center “will honor the late author and innovator through activities that will focus on cultural, scientific and medical transformations that can occur as we increase our understanding of the phenomena of imagination and become more effective at harnessing and incorporating our imaginations in our research and daily lives.”

UCSD’s Sheldon Brown, professor of computing in the arts in the department of visual arts, is the director of the center. The center’s associate director is David Kirsh, professor and former chair of the department of cognitive science.

In addition to drawing upon a wide range of disciplines and collaborations, the Clarke Center will engage the creative worlds of media, the arts and literature to help with discovery. UC San Diego’s unique relationship with speculative fiction and science fiction authors, including Kim Stanley Robinson, David Brin, Nancy Holder, Greg Benford, Vernor Vinge, Greg Bear and Aimee Bender, will allow the center to dismantle traditional boundaries and forge new ways of thinking about the future.

SF Exhibit at SDSU

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strange2_0Greg Bear’s lecture today, March 22 at 2:00, kicks off San Diego State University’s exhibit of science fiction items from its collection, Strange Data, Infinite Possibilities.

An SDSU alumnus, Bear sold his first short story to Famous Science Fiction at age 15 and, along with high-school friends, helped found San Diego Comic-Con. At SDSU, he was a teaching assistant for Prof. Elizabeth Chater’s science fiction course and went on to be a quite successful writer of hard science fiction, fantasy and horror. Bear is the recipient of two Hugo Awards and five Nebula Awards and has had more than 60 works published. His newest book, Halo: Silentium (Tor Books, 2013) will be available for signing.

Other lectures in this series will be given by Larry McCafferey (April 18) and Vernor Vinge (May 16).

The library built its SF collection with contributions from SDSU English professor Elizabeth Chater, who in 1977 began donating her science fiction books to Special Collections in Love Library; William D. Phillips, Jr.; Larry McCaffery; and Edward E. Marsh. 

Strange Data, Infinite Possibilities will remain in the library’s Donor Hallway through late August 2013. 

[Thanks to John King Tarpinian for the story.]

Hertz: Moskowitz to Eaton, $250 to DUFF

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home_eaton-collection-hours_columnBy John Hertz: An anonymous donor has given DUFF $250 to send a rare copy of Sam Moskowitz’ Immortal Storm to the Eaton Collection.

SaM chaired the first World Science Fiction Convention. Besides his fan activity he edited a Gernsback magazine, wrote s-f, anthologized, and was generally a force of nature.

The Immortal Storm is his history of s-f fandom from the 1920s to World War II. Its title indicates its impassioned style. It remains indispensable.

This copy is from the limited mimeograph edition of 1951, after the Storm burst in Langley Searles’ Fantasy Commentator, before the 1954 hardback. A knowledgeable collector has estimated it is in Very Good condition.

DUFF the Down Under Fan Fund, like TAFF the Trans-Atlantic Fan Fund, sends fans on long-distance visits. TAFF began in 1953, DUFF in 1972, others followed, all sustained by donations. DUFF goes between North America and Australia – New Zealand.

Eaton, the world’s largest publicly accessible holding of science fiction, fantasy, and like that, is located at the Riverside campus of the University of California.

Last year Chicon VII the 70th Worldcon, at Chicago, had as is customary an auction to benefit the fan-travel funds. It was held in the exhibit hall, next to the Fanzine Lounge.

Some items came too late to be auctioned and will have to be used for raising money otherwise. One was this copy of Storm from Bob Passovoy (with his wife Anne, Fan Guests of Honor at Chicon VI) who could not get to the con that day but wanted to support DUFF.

Speaking as DUFF’s North America Administrator, I do not consider DUFF or its sister funds sell things.

As an Englishman once said, the exchanges which take place are measures of mutual assistance rendered by friends, in a spirit of confidence, sympathy, and good will.

A copy of this edition of Storm shows how physical production can be informative. It illustrates the art of mimeography.

The texture of the paper, the color of paper and ink, the appearance of typewriting, done by hand, teach what amateur publishing was sixty years ago, even to someone who may never have practiced slipsheeting or worked at a collating party.

Dr. Melissa Conway, head of Special Collections & Archives at U.C. Riverside and thus of Eaton, says the Storm has arrived.

Artifact as well as thought is elemental to history.

C. L. Moore’s Student Stories

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Three stories C. L. Moore wrote for Indiana University’s literary magazine The Vagabond are available to read on the IU library blog.

She studied at IU in the early 1930s –

However, before officially declaring a major, she withdrew from the university due to the financial hardships of the Great Depression and returned to Indianapolis to work as a secretary.

Her 1931 story “Semira” begins –

“For the past ten years I have been a Deity, omnipotent over the population of an island group located, at present, somewhere indeterminately southward in the Pacific.”

The rest of it doesn’t live up to the hook – nothing really happens to make a reader invest in the story’s characters or outcome — yet Moore’s style and pacing kept me turning the pages.

“Two Fantasies” delivers a pair of evocative fragments, one mythic, one weird.

“Happily Ever After,” the best of the three, tells why Cinderella’s life was miserable after her dream came true – in sprightly, humorous prose leading to an even happier ending.

Moore was rapidly developing as a writer when she had to leave Indiana University. Less than two years after her final contribution appeared in The Vagabond Moore premiered in Weird Tales with the classic “Shambleau.”

[Thanks to Michael J. Walsh for the story.]

SF Symposium at UC Irvine

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“The Future Is Here: California in Science Fiction” convenes at UC Irvine Thursday, April 4. Writers Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, Gregory Benford, Sheila Finch and Steven Barnes will participate, and also scholars Catherine Liu, Sherryl Vint and Matthew Wolf-Meyer.

The West Coast of the US, and California in particular, has long been a source of inspiration for the SF imagination: the state’s history offers a rich repository of utopian schemes, dystopian realities, collectivist experiments, and commercial and  ecological catastrophes. During the Cold War and after California has represented the vanguard of technoscientific progress, free-market ideology, lifestyle libertarianism, and countercultural experimentation. California shares the seismic instabilities of the Pacific Rim and is integrated into the cultural and economic exchanges facilitated and regulated by global capital throughout the region. California exists in the larger cultural imagination as both a much-dreamed-of sphere of spiritual discovery and multicultural hybridity as well as a nightmarish realm of ecological disaster and race war. Join us for a lively discussion of these and other issues with SF writers, theorists, and critics.

Here are the scheduled highlights:

  • 12:30-1:30 Oath of Fealty: Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, and Gregory Benford on the classic novel about a surveillance community in Los Angeles
  • 1:30-3:30 A State of Difference: Sheila Finch and Steven Barnes on writing gender and race in Californian SF
  • 3-4:30 Breakout sessions: Writing SF

Workshop on Writing SF with Sheila Finch

Workshop on Writing SF with Steven Barnes

  • 4:30-5 Concluding Roundtable: The Critics & Theorists React: CA & SF?

Catherine Liu, UCI Film and Media

Sherryl Vint, UCR English

Matthew Wolf-Meyer UCSC Anthropology

The event takes place in Humanities Gateway 1030. It is sponsored with a grant from the California Studies Consortium, the UCI Humanities Collective and the UCI Center for Excellence in Writing and Communication.

Ted Chiang at UCR on 3/4

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Ted Chiang

Acclaimed sf writer Ted Chiang will read selections from his work at UC Riverside on March 4 at 7 p.m. in the Department of English conference room, HMNSS 2212.

“Ted Chiang is the premier writer of short fiction in the field today,” says Rob Latham, professor of English and a senior editor of the journal Science Fiction Studies.

He has won the John W. Campbell Award for best new writer, four Nebula awards, four Hugo awards, three Locus awards, a Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award, the Sidewise Award, and a British Science Fiction Association Award.

The event is free and open to the public. Parking costs $5.

Elfquest Archive Goes To Columbia

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Richard and Wendy Pini have donated the archive of Elfquest, the popular comic book they created 1978, to Columbia University Libraries/Information Services’ Rare Book and Manuscript Library.  

Columbia is getting every piece of original art from ElfQuest, including original art boards and pages from the comic book series, which was largely self-published by the Pinis. 

Richard Pini explains why they did not follow the trend of many other artists and sell their original pages –

At first, the decision to hang on to every page of Wendy’s Elfquest art was mostly a commercial one; we never knew when we might need the original boards for reprinting.  There was also an emotional component. I remembered the long hours Wendy put in, the editorial debates we had, the shared joy of seeing exactly the right expression on a character’s face. Now that we have high-quality digital scans of it all, we’re honored to donate the entire archive to Columbia.

The Pinis’ archives also include original art from an unrealized animated adaptation of Michael Moorcock’s fantasy novel Stormbringer and from a graphic novel adaptation of The Masque of the Red Death; drafts of scripts and novelizations; copies of each edition of the ElfQuest graphic novels; fanzines created by both the Pinis and their fans; correspondence, contracts, and legal records; and the design for Wendy Pini’s Red Sonja cosplay costume.

[Thanks to Michael J. Walsh for the story.]

Steampunk at UC Davis

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Shields Library at UC Davis is hosting a steampunk exhibit through the winter quarter of 2013. The physical exhibit features a selection of books and other material. Of even greater interest to fans online is the exhibit’s website, with a rich array of background information about the subgenre and links to many interesting resources. You’ll find the presentation organized under tabs for “Worlds of Steampunk,” “Steampunk Bibliography,” “Steampunk Online – Blogs & Events,” “Steampunk Films,” “Steampunk Art, Gadgets and More –,” and “Steampunk Virtual Worlds.”

Hobbit Twacks!

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The LOTR geneology project has created a visual aid for moviegoers…

Here are some choice links to stories inspired by the imminent release of Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey.

(1) If you’re curious about the movie’s score, listen to the closing theme, ”Song of the Lonely Mountain” by Neil Finn.

(2) Christopher Tolkien’s first-ever press interview, published in Le Monde on July 9, is available online. Christopher is not a Peter Jackson enthusiast:

Invited to meet Peter Jackson, the Tolkien family preferred not to. Why? “They eviscerated the book by making it an action movie for young people aged 15 to 25,” Christopher says regretfully. “And it seems that The Hobbit will be the same kind of film.”

This divorce has been systematically driven by the logic of Hollywood. “Tolkien has become a monster, devoured by his own popularity and absorbed into the absurdity of our time,” Christopher Tolkien observes sadly. “The chasm between the beauty and seriousness of the work, and what it has become, has overwhelmed me. The commercialization has reduced the aesthetic and philosophical impact of the creation to nothing. There is only one solution for me: to turn my head away.”

(3) I’m betting the Tolkien estate wishes it could inflict on Jackson the same fate a court just inflicted on Global Asylum’s faux Hobbit film:

A U.S. District Court in California granted a temporary restraining order on Monday preventing a parody of “The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey” from going on sale three days before Peter Jackson’s movie opens in theaters nationwide.

Global Asylum, a film production company that makes parodies of blockbuster films, such as “Transmorphers” in place of ‘Transformers,” has made a parody of “The Hobbit” titled “Age of the Hobbits.” It was set to go on sale on DVD, Blu-Ray and online platforms December 11.

(4) Scholars interested in The Hobbit know all roads lead to… Milwaukee? Well, if not all roads, surely a superhighway or two. That’s home to Marquette University, where Christopher Tolkien deposited many of J.R.R. Tolkien’s original manuscripts:

Yes, Tolkien fans: the stories belong to the ages, but the manuscripts belong to Marquette University. It has been so since 1957, thanks to a very smart librarian, William Ready, who had been hired the year before to help fill a then-new Memorial Library. He approached the not-yet-famous Professor Tolkien through a British rare-book seller, struck a deal for less than $5,000, and in 1957 and 1958 the boxes from Oxford arrived: “The Lord of the Rings” and “The Hobbit,” in longhand drafts, typewritten manuscripts and page proofs, with revisions and rejected fragments, along with minor and then-unpublished texts and other papers. After the professor died in 1973, his son Christopher sent more papers still, until Marquette came to hold the vast machinery of Middle-earth in all its original parts, along with thousands of pages of articles, commentary and fan fiction — the vast forests and foothills of secondary scholarship now girding Mount Tolkien.

[Thanks for these links goes out to David Klaus, Martin Morse Wooster and Andrew Porter.]