After the last original member of First Fandom, Bob Madle, died last October, the organization’s leadership decided to canvass the membership, now composed of Associate Members who have been active in fandom for more than three decades, asking whether First Fandom should continue and in what form. President John L. Coker III has shared the results of the survey in the group’s newsletter and with File 770.
First Fandom Questionnaire
(Reprinted from Scientifiction, the First Fandom quarterly newsletter, No. 75 – 1Q2023, edited by John L. Coker III.)
(75) questionnaires were sent out to the members. (57) members responded (that’s an approximately 78% participation rate). Here are the four questions:
(1) Now that there are no original members left, should we continue as an organization?
(2) If you do feel that we should continue, should we reorganize under a new name to legitimately continue our original mission of presenting awards, issuing our publications, keeping alive the memories, and having fun?
(3) Do you agree that, in the new organization, the members’ annual dues should be current?
(4) Do you wish to become a Charter Member?
Results
(1) An overwhelming majority of respondents said that we should continue as an organization, and only four said we should not continue as an organization. One respondent felt that “it was time everyone moved on to something else, whether it be a foundation or something not yet thought of.” One stated that they did not care. Another: “I like the idea of an organization bringing together long-time fen interested in the history of fan-dom. I’m not enthusiastic about organizing the group as a memorial to a generation of folks all of whom I love to read about but not all of whom I necessarily feel comfortable lionizing.” Another: “I think First Fandom should now be ended. Some kind of organization to honor the first fans is a nice idea. I’ll applaud it, but probably won’t join it. Another: “First Fandom was *their* thing. I was friends with some of them, but I wasn’t *one* of them. Some of those guys made it clear to me that they wanted the organization to end when they did. So, I say, let it end.”
(2) An overwhelming majority of respondents said that we should reorganize under a new name so that we could continue our original mission, and only three respondents said that we should not reorganize under a new name. One person stated “…they had no problem keeping the organization going with the original name.” One stated they did not care. Another wrote: “Count me in!” Another person wrote: “If the questionnaire were longer, I’d vote for measures to broaden rather than freeze the definition of ‘First’.”
(3) All but two respondents felt that, in order to belong to the new proposed organization, the members needed to be current in their dues. One person felt that if some members were unable to afford dues, that their dues should be paid for them by a reserve fund. One person noted that in the past some members had made a lifetime dues payment.
(4) An overwhelming majority of respondents felt that they did want to become charter members of the new organization. Only four respondents did not want to become charter members. One respondent said it depended on the cost. Another suggested that we could merge with or align themselves with another organization (for example, the Science Fiction Research Association) so that our members would have opportunities to be published.
Conclusions
Based on written responses to the questionnaire, the great majority of our members agree that we should continue, but that we should reorganize under a new name. Most agreed that members should pay annual dues. Nearly all respondents felt that if a new organization was formed, they wanted to be charter members of that new organization.
So, according to our membership, it seems that “First Fandom is not dead.” It is just reorganizing. Dinosaurs that adapt will not as easily go extinct. More information about our path forward will be made available soon.
Three classic trip reports have been added to the Trans-Atlantic Fan Fund’s library of free downloads. And if you enjoy them, a donation to TAFF is a fine way to express your appreciation. All are available in several electronic formats.
Robert A. “Bob” Madle (1920-2022) was the first North American TransAtlantic Fan Fund winner to travel to Europe at TAFF expense and the first to write a trip report on his experience. He attended the 1957 London Worldcon, the first to be held outside North America. A Fake Fan in London includes a detailed examination of the controversy (reflected in the title) resulting from the fact that many UK fans had preferred the rival candidate Dick Eney, a much newer fan whose activity was more visible across the transatlantic gulf between fandoms. All was amicably resolved. Madle died in October 2022 at the ripe age of 102, the last surviving member of the real First Fandom.
Ansible Editions ebook added to the TAFF library on 1 February 2023. Over 37,000 words. Cover drawing by Linda Miller from the first collected edition published in 1976.
Len and June Moffatt were the 1973 US TAFF winners, travelling from California to that year’s UK Eastercon, OMPAcon ’73, held in Bristol. Their joint trip report The Moffatt House Abroad followed promptly in 1974.
Cover artwork by Bernie Zuber for APA-L, used as an interior in the 1974 edition. Ansible Editions ebook added to the TAFF site on 1 February 2023. Over 44,000 words.
Ron Ellik (1938-1968), nicknamed “Squirrel”, was a popular Los Angeles fan highly active from the mid-1950s, co-editing the Hugo-winning newszine Fanac with Terry Carr. He won the 1961 TAFF race against Dick Eney and travelled from the USA to the 1962 UK Eastercon in Harrogate. The ensuing lively trip report The Squirrel’s Tale was serialized in the Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society’s Shangri L’Affaires in 1962 and 1963, revised by Ellik in 1965, and published by LA friends a year after his tragic death in a January 1968 car accident.
Ansible Editions ebook added to the TAFF library on 1 February 2023. 27,000 words. Cover photo of Ron Ellik in squirrel costume from the Ethel Lindsay collection; photographer unknown.
(1) TAKES FOUR. Nancy Kress told Facebook readers what qualities a writer needs to have:
In a recent interview that I was recording for my and Robert Lanza’s forthcoming novel, Observer, the interviewer asked, “What qualities do you think an aspiring writer must have?” This is something to which I have given a lot of thought because I am often asked it by attendees at Taos Toolbox. I think there are four necessary qualities: talent, persistence, flexibility, and luck….
(2) DAW ACQUIRES TWO JOHN WISWELL FANTASY NOVELS. Katie Hoffman, Senior Editor at DAW Books, has acquired World rights to two fantasy novels by Nebula Award-winning author John Wiswell, represented by Hannah Bowman at Liza Dawson Associates.
Wiswell’s debut novel, scheduled for Spring 2024, is Someone You Can Build A Nest In. Pitched as Gideon The Ninth meets Circe, this highly-anticipated fantasy is a creepy, charming monster-slaying sapphic romance—from the perspective of the monster, a shapeshifter named Shesheshen who falls in love with a human.
At the core of this dark fantasy is a heartwarming, cozy rom-com. While a chilling tale of generational harm and the struggle of surviving in a hostile world, Someone You Can Build A Nest In also stubbornly offers that possibility that, through surprising connections, we may still discover new definitions of love and relearn our own value. Acquiring editor Katie Hoffman says, “It feeds a growing delight I’ve seen in blending the gruesome and the whimsical, the bloody and the quaint.”
Short summary:
Shesheshen has made a mistake fatal to all monsters: she’s fallen in love. Shesheshen is a shapeshifter, who usually resides as an amorphous lump in the swamp of a ruined manor, unless impolite monster hunters invade intent on murdering her. Through a chance encounter, she meets a different kind of human, warm-hearted Homily, who mistakes Shesheshen as a human in turn. Shesheshen is loath to deceive, but just as she’s about to confess her true identity, Homily reveals she’s hunting a shapeshifting monster that supposedly cursed her family. Shesheshen didn’t curse anyone, but to give them both a chance at happiness, she must figure out why Homily’s twisted family thinks she did. And the bigger challenge remains: surviving her toxic in-laws long enough to learn to build a life with the love of her life.
Someone You Can Build A Nest In will be published by DAW Books in Spring 2024.
(3) HOMETOWN HERO. A local paper, Weser-Kurier, interviewed Cora Buhlert about her Hugo win and the article appeared today. It’s behind a paywall, unfortunately, but you can see the photo of Cora very carefully hugging her Hugo trophy: “Cora Buhlert aus Stuhr gewinnt als erste deutsche Autorin Hugo Award”.
(4) MOORCOCK Q&A. Goodman Games’ interview with Michael Moorcock is now online on their YouTube channel:
A special episode of Sanctum Secorum Live with guest Michael Moorcock. In honor of the forthcoming release of the newest book in the Elric saga, The Citadel of Forgotten Myths.
(5) RHYMES WITH “PLAYED WELL”. John Hertz sends this tribute to the late Bob Madle.
Mighty, he was mild,
All our worlds open to him.
Doors that he had made
Let designers, dreamers through.
Each imagination gained.
An acrostic in unrhymed 5-7-5-7-7- syllable lines.
(6) ANGELA LANSBURY (1925-2022). Actress Angela Lansbury died October 11 at the age of 96. Best known to the TV-watching generation as Jessica Fletcher in Murder, She Wrote, she earlier gained fame with three Oscar nominated roles in Gaslight (1944), The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945), and The Manchurian Candidate (1962).
On Broadway she won several Tony Awards, including one for her turn in Stephen Sondheim’s 1979 musical play Sweeney Todd.
She appeared in the Disney hit Bedknobs and Broomsticks in 1971, and later featured in other children’s films, providing the voice for Mrs Potts in the animated Beauty and the Beast; and more recently Mary Poppins Returns.
Carl Andor has a thorough roundup of Lansbury’s genre credits in a comment for File 770.
(7) MEMORY LANE.
1973 – [By Cat Eldridge.]
Spock:Consider. Chuft Captain has been attacked by an herbivorous pacifist, an eater of leaves and roots, one who traditionally does not fight. And the ultimate insult, I left him alive. Chuft Captain’s honor is at stake. He must seek personal revenge before he can call for help.
Sulu:That gives us some time. You did plan it that way?
Spock: Of course.
Star Trek: the Animated Series’ “The Slaver Weapon”
So we all know that Star Trek: the Animated Series followed the first series and debuted on September 8, 1973. It would end that run a mere twenty-two episodes later on October 12, 1974.
Did I like the series? I think that two aspects of it were done really, really well. The voice cast was stellar, with almost all of the original cast save Walter Koenig voicing their characters. It is said, but this is only rumor, originally Filmation was only going to pay for three actors, that being Shatner, Nimoy, and Doohan.
Nimoy however said that he wouldn’t take part unless the rest of the original cast was included. However the studio stuck to its guns as to how many it would budget for and Walter Koenig was dropped because of what he wanted. However Nimoy did get him some writing gigs for the show.
The other was the stories. Being animated gave them a wider artistic frame to work with than the original show had and they used that to their creative benefit. An example of this was Niven merging his Known Space story, “The Soft Weapon” into the Trek universe. It was wonderful and it was great to see the Kzin visualized.
(Everything here was novelized by Alan Dean Foster. He first adapted three episodes per book, but later editions saw the half-hour scripts expanded into full, novel-length stories.)
I think the animation was at best weak. It looked flat, one dimensional. The characters as if they really weren’t quite there. I’ve never been a fan of Filmation.
I just rewatched that episode on Paramount +. The print is stellar and the voices are great. The animation was, as I thought it was, less than great. Watching characters move is painful to say the least as they don’t walk so as much glide across the screen.
(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]
Born October 12, 1875 — Aleister Crowley. Mystic. Charlatan possibly. Genre writer? You decide. But I’ve no doubt that he had a great influence upon the genre as I’m betting many of you can note works in which he figures. One of the earliest such cases is Land of Mist, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle which was published in 1926. (Died 1947.)
Born October 12, 1903 — Josephine Hutchinson. She was Elsa von Frankenstein with Basil Rathbone and Boris Karloff in Son of Frankenstein. She was in “I Sing the Body Electric”, The Twilight Zone episode written by Bradbury that he later turned into a short story. (Died 1998.)
Born October 12, 1904 — Lester Dent. Pulp-fiction author who was best known as the creator and main author of the series of novels chronicling Doc Savage. Of the one hundred and eighty-one Doc Savage novels published by Street and Smith, one hundred and seventy-nine were credited to Kenneth Robeson; and all but twenty were written by Dent. (Died 1959.)
Born October 12, 1916 — Lock Martin. His claim to fame was that he was one of the tallest humans that ever lived. At seven feet and seven inches (though this was disputed by some who shouldn’t have), he was also quite stocky. He had the distinction of playing Gort in The Day The Earth Stood Still. He was also in The Incredible Shrinking Man as a giant, but his scenes were deleted. And he shows up in Invaders from Mars as the Mutant carrying David to the Intelligence though he goes uncredited in the film. (Died 1959.)
Born October 12, 1924 — Randy Stuart. She’s best remembered as Louise Carey, the wife of Scott Carey, in The Incredible Shrinking Man. She was also Frances Hiller in “Anniversary of a Murder” on One Step Beyond which conceived as a companion series to TheTwilight Zone. (Died 1996.)
Born October 12, 1943 — Linda Shaye, 79 . She’s been an actress for over forty years and has appeared in over ninety films, mostly horror. Among them is A Nightmare on Elm Street, Critters, Insidious, Dead End, 2001 Maniacs and its sequel 2001 Maniacs: Field of Screams, Jekyll and Hyde… Together Again, Amityville: A New Generation, Ouija, and its prequel Ouija: Origin of Evil. She even appeared in the first and only true version of The Running Man as a Propaganda Officer.
Born October 12, 1942 — Daliah Lavi. She’s in Casino Royale as The Detainer, a secret agent. In the same year, she was in Jules Verne’s Rocket to the Moon as Madelaine. She was Purificata in The Demon, an Italian horror film. If you’re into German popular music, you might recognize her as she was successful there in Seventies and Eighties. (Died 2017.)
Born October 12, 1965 — Dan Abnett, 57. His earlier work was actually on Doctor Who Magazine, but I’ll single out his co-writing Guardians of the Galaxy #1–6 with Andy Lanning, The Authority: Rule Britannia which is an exceptional piece of work by any standardsand his Border Princes novel he did in the Torchwood universe as great looks at him as a writer.
Born October 12, 1968 — Hugh Jackman, 54. Obviously Wolverine in the Marvel film franchise including the next Deadpool film. He’s also been the lead character in Van Helsing as well as voicing him in the animated prequel Van Helsing: The London Assignment. One of his most charming roles was voicing The Easter Bunny in The Rise of The Guardians which I really, really liked. And he played Robert Angier in The Prestige based off the novel written by the real Christopher Priest. Not the fake one.
(9) GOING POSTAL. “I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed, or numbered.” Well, they haven’t got there yet. “Irish postal service launches digital stamp” – BBC has the story.
An Post, the postal service in the Republic of Ireland, has launched a new digital stamp.
Customers will receive a 12-digit unique code via the company’s app which they can write onto their envelope where the traditional stamp would go.
An Post’s letter sorting technology will recognise the code as a live stamp when it is being processed for delivery.
The digital stamp costs €2 (£1.76) compared with €1.25 (£1.10) for a normal one.
Garrett Bridgeman, managing mirector for An Post Commerce, said: “Here we have a product that works for everyone; busy individuals who are time-poor and want to purchase stamps at a time and place that works for them; or last-minute senders, as well as SMEs and business owners who need to post at irregular hours and may not have stamps to hand.”
Warner Bros. Television Group (WBTVG) laid off 82 scripted, unscripted, and animation employees on Tuesday, and will not fill 43 more vacant positions. The 125 positions represented 26% of the companies workforce across those units.
However, the layoffs, which were generally expected, don’t tell the whole story of what’s going on at Warner Bros. Discovery’s animation units. In fact, there was an even more consequential announcement yesterday that fundamentally alters the structure of Cartoon Network Studios going forward and will have a far-reaching impact on the projects that it produces. The company calls it part of its “strategic realignment.”
(11) GAINING AN EDGE. Michael Harrington interviews Oliver Brackenbury, editor of New Edge Sword and Sorcery Magazine at Black Gate.
What are your thoughts on “inclusion” in the New Edge Movement?
[Brackenbury] This resurgence of New Edge Sword & Sorcery as a term to rally behind, back in the spring of this year, started from that all too familiar conversational space of “How do we get more people into this genre?” Well, if you want more people getting into this thing we love, then you need to include more people!
You can’t hope to expand an audience without reaching outside that audience, while doing your best to make the scene welcoming for everyone. For example, don’t scratch your head wondering why more women don’t read and write in the genre when you’re reluctant to call out sexism in the scene, or perhaps simply aren’t directly reaching out to women, merely hoping they’ll show up. You can replace “women” and “sexism” in this example with just about every intersection of identity that isn’t my fellow white, cishet, neurotypical, able-bodied fellas (or “white guys,” for brevity’s sake).
Nothing wrong with my fellow white guys, I don’t want them to go away, or have anything taken away from them. I just think inclusion is vital if S&S is to have a third wave of mass appeal, akin or even superior to what it enjoyed in the second wave of the 60’s through early 80’s. Call out hatred and harassment, give people a head’s up when they go back to read certain classics, and just, ya know, be cool, man.
A larger, more diverse scene benefits absolutely everyone. With a greater variety of people, we’ll get to enjoy a greater number & variety of stories, artistic works, and viewpoints!
(13) SPIRITED TRAILER. Nothing says more about the holidays than it’s time for Will Ferrell and Ryan Reynolds to bash each other on Apple TV!
Happy Birthday, Hugh. This year, I’m giving you the gift of being much worse than you at singing and dancing. But at least there’s Will and Octavia!
[Thanks to Mike Kennedy, Martin Morse Wooster, JJ, John King Tarpinian, John Hertz, Cora Buhlert, Andrew Porter, Chris Barkley, Michael Toman, and Cat Eldridge for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Jayn.]
By Rich Lynch: There have been many times, during my nearly 50 years in science fandom, that I have wondered what it must have been like to been a member of the very earliest fan organizations. To have attended the very earliest science fiction conventions including the first Worldcon. To have been friends with famous fans and pros when they were young men and women. What would it have been like to have been a part of the forefront of fandom back then? What would it have been like?
I was fortunate to have had a friend who had done all of those things and more. Whenever I met or corresponded with him, whenever I sat in on a convention panel where he was a participant, whenever I read from some of his many fan publications that described previous eras of fandom, it was like I was in the presence of a living time machine. His name was Bob Madle.
I had known of Bob even before my first days in fandom back in the mid‑1970s. But it was my great misfortune not to have met him in person until shortly after I had moved to Maryland in 1988. By then I had taken a strong interest in what had happened in earlier eras of fandom and this had manifested into me becoming co-editor, along with my wife Nicki, of a fanzine (Mimosa) whose very reason for existence was the need to preserve bits of fan history, especially from the First Fandom ‘dinosaur’ era, that were then only fragilely kept in the memories of some of the older fans. After our relocation to Maryland it seemed almost too good to be true that one of the most prominent fans of all lived just a short distance away.
I don’t have strong memories of my first meeting with Bob except that he was warm and welcoming when I showed up at his front door one afternoon. He took me down into his basement to see all the science fiction books and magazines that he had for sale in his mail order business, and I do have a strong memory of that. It was awesome. It was like a miniature version of the Area 51 warehouse where the Lost Ark of the Covenant ended up, except that there were stacks of books instead of wooden crates. I must have looked dumbstruck because when I looked over at Bob he had a big grin on his face.
It was only a bit more than two years after arriving in Maryland that I had taken on a big fanhistory project as editor of Harry Warner’s 1950s fanhistory book A Wealth of Fable, and Bob was an invaluable resource who I called upon frequently. He was everything from a fact checker to a provider of photographs for the book to a source of anecdotes and stories about fandom of the `50s. I didn’t actually need the latter since it was Harry’s manuscript, but it allowed me to plant the seed that he really ought to preserve these tales, either in print or on tape. And eventually he did.
It was at the 1998 Worldcon, held in relatively nearby Baltimore, that I finally got the opportunity to do a taped interview with Bob. It was unfortunately not very well attended and held in a room where there were distractions going on outside, but it still resulted in a transcript which was published in two parts in Mimosa. In the first part Bob described his personal odyssey, starting with his discovery of science fiction from futuristic pulp magazine covers in the early 1930s, to the first-ever science fiction convention in 1936, to the beginnings of the Worldcons, through the war years of the 1940s, to the first Philadelphia Worldcon in 1947. In the second, he brought the narrative into the 1950s where the he was involved in the invention of the Hugo Awards, the origination of First Fandom, a very contentious Trans-Atlantic Fan Fund election, and even a less-than-successful attempt to bring fandom to another part of the country. Wonderful stuff.
Come the new millennium, my contacts with Bob became fewer and fewer with the passage of time. We still crossed paths every so often, but usually it was for only relatively brief instances. The last time I visited him at his home was in 2008, and it turned out to be a memorable encounter because it was the only time that I ever had my picture taken with him. I remember that we had an extended chat about fan history and, more specifically, the 1939 Worldcon. And I also remember that I wished it could have gone on a lot longer than it did.
Bob was 102 when he died, and we’re all wishing he could have gone on a lot longer than it did. It was a life well-lived, filled with many memorable events that he participated in. I feel honored that I was his friend and that he shared many of those events with descriptions vivid enough that I could almost believe I was there. So I’ll end this remembrance by paraphrasing Dr. Seuss: “Don’t be sad that it’s over, smile because it happened.” I’m sad, but all my pleasant memories of Bob are making me smile. I think he’d have liked that.
Introduction by John L. Coker III: Today I received a telephone call from Jane Madle (Bob Madle’s daughter). She was very sad to report that Bob died this past Saturday, October 8th. Jane said that Bob had been in generally pretty good health until recently, spending his time reading, listening to his favorite music, watching baseball on TV with a couple of beers, and occasionally visiting with friends who came to see him.
The death of Bob Madle brings a very long era to a gentle close. He was a life-long fan and a true living legend.
Appreciation Prepared by John L. Coker III and Jon D. Swartz. After service in World War II, where he met his future wife, Billie, he attended Drexel Institute and received a bachelor’s degree on the G. I. Bill; he later attended night school for an MBA degree.
He started reading at a very young age, collected boy’s books, was a fan of Burroughs and Buck Rogers, and began reading magazine science fiction with Wonder Stories, the December, 1930 and April, 1931 issues.
Around this time, he started writing LoCs to SF prozines. In 1934, he formed the Boys’ Science Fiction Club with fellow fans. The following year a letter of his appeared in the pulp magazine Pirate Stories, published by Hugo Gernsback, and won him a year’s subscription to Wonder Stories. In his letter he suggested that Pirate Stories publish a story about a space pirate of the future and that Edmond Hamilton should write it.
In October 1936, some of the New York Futurians (including Donald A. Wollheim, John B. Michel, Herbert E. Goudket, David A. Kyle, Frederik Pohl and William S. Sykora) took a train to Philadelphia, where they were met by Madle, Milton A. Rothman, and Oswald V. Train. Later they were joined by other Philadelphia fans. This meeting, known as the First Eastern SF Convention, is regarded as the very first SF convention.
Jack Agnew, John V. Baltadonis, Robert A. Madle (1937)Robert Madle in 1938.
At the first Worldcon in New York in 1939, Madle was picked to represent Pennsylvania. He was the first American TAFF delegate (1957) and published his famous “A Fake Fan in London” as his trip report. At the 1957 convention, he was made a member of the order of St. Fantony.
Front: Mark Reinsberg, Jack Agnew, Ross Rocklynne Top: V. Kidwell, Robert A. Madle, Erle Korshak, Ray Bradbury Coney Island, 7/4/1939 (during first Worldcon)
He edited several important, early SF fanzines, including Fantascience Digest, in the 1930s – 1940s. In 1948, under the imprint of New Era Publishers, Madle issued a hardcover book featuring two novels by David A. Keller: The Solitary Hunters and The Abyss.
His awards, appearances, and other honors over the years included: 1974, Big Heart Award; 1977, FGoH, Suncon; 1982, GoH at Lunicon 82; 1990, elected to First Fandom Hall of Fame; 1990, Special Guest, Boskone 33; 2002, Sam Moskowitz Archive Award; 2012, GoH at Philcon 2012. In addition, he is credited with naming the Hugo Award.
Bob Madle at home in 2020. Photo by Jane Madle.
A highly respected book dealer for many years, he published his Amazing Madle Catalogue on a regular basis. His catalogs were full of important bibliographic information, and a joy to read.
Madle was a founding member of FAPA in 1937, a founder of The National Fantasy Fan Federation (N3F) in 1941, and of First Fandom in 1958. He was First Fandom’s initial president, holding the office for twenty-five years. He later served another decade as its President Emeritus.
He was the last surviving attendee of the first SF convention (1936) and the first World SF Convention (1939). He was the last surviving founding member of both First Fandom and the N3F and will be greatly missed by the members of both organizations.
Moreover, he was the subject of the First Fandom 2020 Annual, which contained a complete bibliography of his genre writing along with photographs and articles from some of his friends.
From the time he was young, Robert A. Madle was highly regarded as an active fan, fully engaged in the issues of the day and tomorrow. He got to meet and befriend most of the great SF fans and pros starting in the Golden Age. His was a unique perspective, experienced across ten decades. Bob’s generosity and dedication to SF fandom was only matched by his personal knowledge of the field and the admiration of his thousands of friends.
A life-long fan and a true living legend, he was the last link in an unbroken chain going back to the dawn of the Golden Age of science fiction.
L-R Jack Agnew, Robert A. Madle, John Newton, Oswald V. Train, John V. Baltadonis. PSFS meeting – Nov 17, 1984. Courtesy of David Ritter.Bob Madle and Mel Korshak (Chicon I, 1940). Collection of Robert A. Madle.
By Curt Phillips. I am deeply sorry to report that we’ve lost Bob Madle.
A phone call from his daughter Jane this afternoon informs me that Bob died peacefully in his sleep Saturday evening, October 8, 2022. He was 102. Bob’s health had been both good and stable until about a week ago when he went into a decline and began to fade away. Jane assures me that he didn’t suffer, and that his last days were calm and peaceful. Funeral arrangements are yet to be announced.
Bob Madle was the last surviving original member of First Fandom, having begun his activity in science fiction fandom in 1933. He was present at one of the earliest club meetings in Philadelphia in 1936, attended the first Worldcon in New York in 1939, and was a long time presence at science fiction conventions around the country. He was an accomplished collector and one of the most important science fiction book and pulp magazine dealers in the world. Few worthwhile collections anywhere haven’t benefited from Bob’s expertise in the field. Bob published David H. Keller’s Solitary Hunters And The Abyss through his New Era Publishers in 1948. He was the TAFF (Trans-Atlantic Fan Fund) delegate in 1957 and attended the first London World SF Convention through TAFF in 1957. He wrote a long running series about science fiction published in the various professional magazines published by his long time friend Robert A. W. Lowndes. He served honorably in the United States Army during World War II.
More important than any of this to me; he was my very good friend. I first met Bob in the late 70’s when I called him at home, explained that I was a science fiction fan and asked if I could I come and visit him. He instantly replied, “Sure, come on over. We’ll talk about science fiction.” And that’s exactly what we did. He also sold me all the SF books and pulps I could carry away, plus when I expressed an interest in several boxes of old fanzines, he suggested I borrow them to read through. That was quite a generous offer considering that he’d just met me! I borrowed those zines, kept them for about a year, and discovered some of the best fan writing ever committed to mimeograph paper. When I took them back on my next visit, Bob quizzed me a little on what I’d read and was delighted that I seemed to have picked up a few things about fandom…
I visited Bob’s home in Rockville, MD several times thereafter, usually catching him watching his beloved Oakland A’s playing baseball on TV. Bob had followed that team since they were the Philadelphia Athletics; his home town team. We always had a grand and relaxing time chatting about baseball and science fiction, which we both agreed were two of the best things in life. He taught me so much about collecting science fiction, particularly early sf, and his vast trove of lore about the early days of both science fiction and early fandom can never be replaced. He was 102. If he’d lived to be twice that it wouldn’t have been enough for me. I had hoped to visit him again this coming spring. Instead I’ll just remember him whenever I read a particularly good story in an issue of Wonder Stories, or whenever I see the Oakland A’s on tv having a good game.
So long Bob, and thanks for 45 years of friendship.
Bob Madle and John BaltadonisBob Madle, Lee Hoffman, Rusty Hevelin.Photos by and (c) Andrew Porter.
…What started in 1992 as an experiment in bringing horror to tweenage bookworms has become a cross-media phenomenon that includes TV shows, movies, comic books and video games. And if Stine had had his way three decades ago, the serieswould have ended before it even began.
“I didn’t want to do Goosebumps,” he reveals now, crediting his wife — author and editor Jane Waldhorn — with pushing him to confront the one thing he actually was afraid of: writing for a younger audience. “She kept after me, saying, ‘No one’s ever done a horror series for 7- to 12-year-olds. We have to try it!’ I said, ‘All right, we’ll try two or three of them.'”…
I’m continuing my Non-Fiction Spotlight project, where I interview the authors/editors of SFF-related non-fiction books that come out in 2022 and are eligible for the 2023 Hugo Awards. For more about the Non-Fiction Spotlight project, go here. To check out the spotlights I already posted, go here.
Why should SFF fans in general and Hugo voters in particular read this book?
McCARTY: I have some great interviews with some great science fiction and fantasy writers such as Alan Dean Foster, Harry Turtledove, Terry Brooks and Charles de Lint and Connie Willis. Plus, a slew of horror and dark fantasy writers and filmmakers as well.
The book is bursting at the seams with great interviews. You’ll walk away knowing more about the interviewees but also about the horror and science fiction publishing and film industry the art and craft of writing books and doing movies.
I hope the reader comes away more knowledgeable and inspired and will write a terrific work after they finish the book. No thanks needed.
(3) ORWELL PRIZES. The Orwell Foundation announced the Orwell Prizes 2022 on July 14.
The Orwell Prize for Political Fiction 2022: Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan (Faber).
The Orwell Prize for Political Writing 2022: My Fourth Time, We Drowned by Sally Hayden (Harper Collins)
The Orwell Prize for Journalism 2022: George Monbiot (The Guardian)
The Orwell Prize for Exposing Britain’s Social Evils 2022: The Cost of Covid – Burnley Crisis by Ed Thomas (BBC News)
A Special Prize was awarded to David Collins and Hannah Al-Othman (The Sunday Times) for The Murder of Agnes Wanjiru. All winners receive £3000 and took part in the Awards Ceremony at Conway Hall on Thursday 14th July 2022. Jean Seaton, the Director of The Orwell Foundation, said of the Book Prizes:
Both Sally Hayden and Claire Keegan have, in very different ways, written gripping stories about things that should alarm us: there are awful truths right at the heart of our societies and systems. However, in their wit, elegance and compassion, these powerful winning books also help us think about the choices we make, and how to make the future better. Orwell would be proud.
(4) FREE READ. The Sunday Morning Transport is doing four free stories in July. The second, Ian Tregillis’ “The Owl and the Reptiloid”, examines a vision of first contact and what comes after.
Edy is boarding the 147 at Foster, running late to a soul-rotting customer-service gig just off Michigan Avenue, when the Secret Masters grace Chicago with a Black Triangle of its very own. But at the historic moment, she’s earning a little sigh of disdain from the bus driver, thanks to some amateur-hour fumbling of her Ventra card….
After decades of declining union membership, organized labor may be on the verge of a resurgence in the U.S. Employees seeking better working conditions and higher pay have recently organized unions at Starbucks, Amazon, Apple and elsewhere. Applications for union elections this year are on pace to approach their highest level in a decade. I asked Noam Scheiber, who covers workers and labor issues for The Times, what’s behind the latest flurry of union activity.
Ian: You recently profiled Jaz Brisack, a Rhodes scholar and barista who helped organize a union at a Starbucks in Buffalo that was the first at a company-owned store in decades. Why did she want to work there?
Noam: Jaz comes out of a tradition. We saw it during the Depression; people with radical politics taking jobs with the explicit intention of organizing workers. The term for this is “salting,” like the seasoning. The practice has had some limited success in recent decades, but we’re seeing a broader revival of it, and Jaz is part of that. Several salts got jobs at Amazon and helped organize a facility on Staten Island. Academics like Barry Eidlin and Mie Inouye have written extensively about this.
(6) PODCAST PEOPLE. Simultaneous Times is a monthly science fiction podcast produced by Space Cowboy Books in Joshua Tree, CA. Episode 53 presents stories by Geoff Habiger and Jonathan Nevair read by Jean-Paul Garnier.
Stories featured in this episode:
“Kreuzungmeister” by Geoff Habiger.
“That New Spaceship Smell” by Jonathan Nevair.
(7) HARRYHAUSEN’S LEGACY. [Item by Martin Morse Wooster.] In this video, the Royal Ocean Film Society looks at how Ray Harryhausen, “one of Hollywood’s most beloved craftsmen,” combined live action and stop motion animation. He notes that the methods Harryhausen used were actually quite complicated, and just as Harryhausen built on the work of Willis O’Brien, so do today’s animators at ILM and WETA Digital use Harryhausen’s techniques as a basis for their own work.
(8) LAST SURVIVING MEMBER’S BOTTLE. John L. Coker III told First Fandom members in the latest Scientifiction that he had acknowledged Robert A. Madle as the sole surviving member of First Fandom and dispatched to him the bottle of Beam’s set aside for the winner of a tontine established over 60 years ago.
I sent him the last man’s bottle, inscribed thusly: “This bottle is reserved for science-fiction fandom’s Living Legend Robert A. (Bob) Madle, who in 1958 suggested the idea of forming an organization called First Fandom, a fun-loving group of science-fiction fans of the Golden Era. Founders of First Fandom included C. L. (Doc) Barrett, Don Ford, Lou Tabakow, Ben Keifer and Lynn Hickman. The first person to join the group other than the founders was Robert Bloch. First Fandom would give recognition awards to the great authors of the past, publish a magazine and keep the history of science fiction in front of today’s fans. It would be a “last man’s club” with the final member “knocking off a privately held fifth of liquor.”
(10) HARRY ALM OBIT. Long-time Louisiana fan Harry Alm, husband of Marilyn and mainstay of their region’s fandom (not least filking), died this morning. Marilyn announced the news on Facebook.
(11) MEDIA BIRTHDAY.
1982 – [By Cat Eldridge.] Forty years ago on a summer July evening, Elliott Gould and Mimi Kuzyk starred in this most excellent half hour episode broadcast on HBO of The Ray Bradbury Theater called “The Happiness Machine”.
It is based off the short story that may have first been published in the Saturday Evening Post or the Dandelion Wine novel that was also published that month.
SPOILER ALERT (AS IF YOU NEEDED ONE)
After having upon a summer morning what he thinks is the perfect happiness in watching bees buzzing, birds chirping and children playing and so on the husband builds a happiness machine for his family so that they can experience the joy he feels, but the machine’s effect is not what he expects.
It gives the user a perfect experience of whatever they want which leads to deep depression upon coming back to their usual life. Now given this a Bradbury story, you already know that will be an upbeat ending. After he destroys the Happiness Machine, his wife points out that reality (bees buzzing, birds soaring and chirping with children playing), and of course his home and family are the actual Happiness Machine.
END OF THE SPOILERS (AS IF YOU NEEDED TO BE TOLD)
I like Bradbury, his stories always just interesting enough to worth reading or watching. I thought HBO do a rather great job with the Ray Bradbury Theater.
It’s streaming presently on HBO Max. As always please don’t link to copies on YouTube as they are pirated. We’ll just need to remove your post.
(12) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]
Born July 17, 1889 — Erle Stanley Gardner. Though best remembered for the Perry Mason detective stories, he did write a handful of SF stories, all of which are collected in The Human Zero: The Science Fiction Stories of Erle Stanley Gardner. It is not available from the usual digital suspects but Amazon has copies of the original hardcover edition at reasonable prices. (Died 1970.)
Born July 17, 1952 — David Hasselhoff, 70. Genre roles in the Knight Rider franchise, Nick Fury: Agent of Shield film, as the title characters in — and I’m not kidding — Jekyll & Hyde: The Musical, and in Guardians of the Galaxy: Vol. 2.
Born July 17, 1954 — J. Michael Straczynski, 68. Best known rather obviously for creating and writing most of Babylon 5 and its all too short-lived sequel Crusade. He’s also responsible as well for the Jeremiah and Sense8 series. On the comics sides, he’s written The Amazing Spider-Man, Thor and Fantastic Four. Over at DC, he did the Superman: Earth One trilogy of graphic novels, and has also written Superman, Wonder Woman, and Before Watchmen titles.
Born July 17, 1965 — Alex Winter, 57. Bill in Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure and its sequels Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey and Bill & Ted Face the Music. And though I didn’t realize it, he was Marko in The Lost Boys. He directed two Ben 10 films, Ben 10: Race Against Time and Ben 10: Alien Swarm. He also directed Quantum is Calling, a short film that has cast members Keanu Reeves, Simon Pegg, John Cho, and Paul Rudd.
Born July 17, 1967 — Kelly Robson, 55. She finally has a collection out, nearly five hundred pages of fiction, Alias Space and Other Stories. It’s available at the usual suspects for four dollars and ninety-nine cents. Bliss! It contains “A Human Stain” for which she won a Nebula, and two Aurora winners, “Waters of Versailles” and “Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach”.
Born July 17, 1976 — Brian K. Vaughan, 46. Wow. Author of Ex Machina, the stellar Pride of Baghdad, Runaways, the Hugo winning at LoneStarCon 3 Saga (which has won a BFA and a Dragon), Y: The Last Man which briefly was a series, and one of his latest undertakings, Paper Girls, which is wonderful. You could spend an entire summer just reading those series. In his spare time, he was a writer, story editor and producer of Lost during seasons three through five, and he was the showrunner and executive producer of the Under the Dome series.
Born July 17, 1992 — Billie Lourd, 30. Lourd is the only child of actress Carrie Fisher. She appeared as Lieutenant Connix in the Star Wars sequel trilogy. She also has been a regular cast member on American Horror Story for five seasons.
(13) COMICS SECTION.
Candorvillethinks we should not be assuming this widely believed astronomical fact is true.
(14) FERDINAND’S OFFSRING.[Item by Martin Morse Wooster.] In the Washington Post, the weekly humor competition, conducted by Pat Myers, is about feghoots. And boy, are the winners groaners!
Here are some of the entries that stumped me. YMMV, as they say; the puns might jump right out at you. If so, or if you just want to guess, leave a comment right here at the bottom of the column, rather than in the usual forum of the Style Invitational Devotees group on Facebook. I’m reprinting the entries as they came in, with no editing except to fix spelling, typos, etc. I didn’t check at all who wrote them, though if their authors want to reveal themselves in the comments thread, fine with me!
…The individual placed several different orders, amounting to $35,000 worth of medical and engineering textbooks, each costing between $100 and $200. Then, in late May, staff received a notification from the store’s merchant service provider, flagging a credit card the person used as fraudulent.
The bookstore co-owners went through the individual’s purchases — all of which were shipped to the same address outside Michigan — and quickly realized that the person had placed every past order using a stolen credit card, as well.
“That’s when we started to consider closing,” said Cooper, 28.
They contacted to law enforcement, their insurance provider and different banks, hoping for a reprieve from the serious financial toll they knew the scam would take on their small company. The cost, they were told, would probably fall entirely on them — which would put them out of business.
… “We realized we needed to ask for help,” Erin Pineda said.
The store co-owners started a GoFundMe campaign, and within 10 days, they surpassed their goal of $35,000. They were stunned by the generosity.
“We’re just blown away by how the community responded and lifted us up in a really difficult situation,” Erin Pineda said. “It was incredible.”…
(16) VIDEO OF THE DAY. [Item by Martin Morse Wooster.] An old man struggles to keep his house from collapsing and deal with aging in this 2017 animated film directed by Wong Jin Yao.
[Thanks to Chris Barkley, Michael Toman, Cat Eldridge, Cora Buhlert, “Orange Mike” Lowrey, Mike Kennedy, Martin Morse Wooster, JJ, John King Tarpinian, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Bill.]
(1) NETFLIX GOES UPSIDE DOWN. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] Apparently, fans of Stranger Things are night owls. When the final two episodes of ST Season 4 were released—at about 03:00 Eastern today—the Netflix streaming site was hammered hard enough to experience scattered but significant outages. “Netflix Down: Streaming Service Outage After Stranger Things 4 Release” reports Variety.
Netflix’s streaming service was unavailable for a brief period early Friday after the highly anticipated release of the final two episodes of “Stranger Things 4.”
According to global uptime-monitoring site Downdetector.com, user reports of problems with Netflix spiked around 3 a.m. ET — when “Stranger Things 4” Volume 2 went live. Complaints about errors with Netflix peaked at nearly 13,000 at the top of the hour, before the situation seemed to be resolved within a half hour.
“Stranger Things 4” already has set the record as the No. 1 English-language series on the service in its first four weeks of release, as reported by Netflix based on total hours watched. The two episodes in Season 4 Volume 2 clock in at nearly four hours of runtime total: Episode 8 is 85 minutes and Episode 9 is 150 minutes.
(2) BOB MADLE DOING FINE AT 102. [Item by Curt Phillips.] I just got off the phone with Bob Madle and thought I’d give you an update. He sounds great, and his daughter Jane told me that Bob’s health is excellent. Neither of them ever caught Covid, and Bob spends a lot of time enjoying beer and baseball. He is, as you might guess, an Oakland A’s fan. He’s been following that team since the 1930’s when they were the Philadelphia Athletics. We spent 45 min or so discussing sf magazines, and Bob’s memory is as solid as a rock. He recalled pulp trivia from 90 years ago as if it happened yesterday. So, 102 years old and going strong. A fannish immortal in every way!
(3) STEPHENSON PROFILE. In the Washington Post, Theo Zenou interviews Neal Stephenson on the 30th anniversary of Snow Crash. The interview focuses on Stephenson’s role in tech projects, including founding (with Bitcoin Foundation co-chair Peter Vessenes), Lamina1, “a start-up that will use blockchain technology to build an ‘open metaverse.’” Zenou explains that Stephenson has been involved part-time with tech his entire life, and became employee #1 of Blue Origin after he and Jeff Bezos went to a screening of October Sky in 1999. “Neal Stephenson’s ‘Snow Crash’ predicted metaverse and hyperinflation”.
…Stephenson’s vision for Lamina1 (meaning “layer one” in Latin) is to empower the creators of these experiences. He explained, “We want to create a structure of smart contracts and other utilities that will make it easier for people who want to build Metaverse applications to do that in the first place, and then to get compensated if it turns out that people like and want to pay for the experiences they’re creating.”…
“You had one job, Corporal, one job. Protect Prince Adam, with your life, if necessary. And you failed. I swear, if something happens to Adam, you will be scrubbing toilets for the rest of your life.”
“Yes, Captain.”
“Don’t be so hard on the Corporal, Teela. It wasn’t his fault.”
“I know. I should have gone with Adam. Oh Father, what if something happens to him?”
“We’ll find Adam and save him. I promise.”
Meanwhile, in the dungeons of Snake Mountain…
(5) HAVE AN IDEA FOR A SPACE FORCE STORY? C. Stuart Hardwick is editing an anthology for Baen, Real Stories of the US Space Force, and has put out a Call For Submissions. See full details at the link.
The US Space Force has a PR problem. Several, in fact. It was not Donald Trump’s idea. It did not steal its iconography from Star Trek. It is not just a lunatic scheme to expand the military-industrial complex by sending battleships into space. Yet judging from social media, many think all these things and more.
Space has become critical not only to the military but to the economy and all aspects of daily life, and as we stand at the dawn of a new age of space commerce, that’s only going to intensify, and several nations have already developed capabilities to deny, degrade, and disrupt access to and utilization of space–based assets, whether to degrade US Military capability or as a direct economic attack.
Like it or not, the militarization of space started long ago, threats are already up there, and wherever people and their interests go next, so too will go conflict, intrigue, heroes and villains, everything that comprises good stories….
WHAT WE WANT
Stories that grab us from the start and stay with us for days. Scientifically plausible drama about people facing interesting challenges related to the US Space Force or more generally, the policing and defense of near-Earth space and related issues, now or in the foreseeable future (the next century or so).
Stories don’t have to take place in space, involve the actual US Space Force, or be hard sci-fi, but they should help illustrate in some way how space technology shapes modern civilization in critical, often overlooked ways, how it is now or soon may come under threat, and how it might be defended now and into the future. See this page for ideas and background.
Minicon 10 (1975) – History of the MFS – Poul Anderson, Gordon Dickson, Clifford Simak, Bob Tucker & more:
Minicon 10 was held April 18-20, 1975 in Minneapolis. This panel discussion, orchestrated by Gordy Dickson, majors in history and anecdotes of the 1940s Minneapolis Fantasy Society (MFS). Particpants: Kenny Gray, Poul Anderson, Oliver Saari, Gordon Dickson, Grace Riger, Bob Tucker, and Clifford Simak. A high percentage of the MFS members went on to sell professionally to the magazines.
The panel begins with the flowering of MFS after Clifford Simak moved to town, to anecdotes about late night hero-saving plot sessions to the true identity of Squanchfoot (hint: Simak’s City was dedicated to him).
You’ll hear about the softball games in which many Saaris participated, the origin of Twonk’s disease, how Poul became an MFS member and more.
There’s silly story writing, an imitation Red Boggs, and a mass induction into the MFS. For those that live(d) in Minneapolis, and for those that didn’t, this recording provides an affectionate look at the early MFS…Many thanks to Geri Sullivan and the Video Archeology project for providing the recording.
… For this post, I’m just talking about the last part: how long it takes to publish a book once you sell it to a traditional publisher. Often, unpublished and self-published authors are baffled at turn around time for books. This discourse was most recently kicked off by a tweet asking authors how they would feel if a publisher offered to publish their book yet it would take 2 years and they’d have to cut 10,000 words. The replies were filled with a lot of unpublished authors saying “that’s way too long!” and/or “that’s way too many words to cut!” and then a lot of published authors saying “uh, this is completely standard in publishing?”
…To be very clear, getting published by a good publisher in no way guarantees you’ll get much attention or sell many copies. Yet if you want any chance of getting those things, your publisher needs a lot of time to pitch your book to distributors and bookstores and to do all of the publicity and marketing.
This—the general publicity, marketing, and distribution—is where much of the publishing time disappears. And it’s the kind of stuff you might not realize if you aren’t a traditionally published author. Things like major bookstore orders (including Amazon) are set long before a book is published. Anticipated book lists and “buzz” begins well in advance, sometimes before books are even finished being written. Review copies get sent to reviewers months before books are published, so that reviews can appear when the book does. And so on and so forth.
In addition to the distribution, marketing, and publicity there are other important steps if you want a professional book, especially editing (big scale stuff), copyediting (line level stuff), proofreading (typos). There are many other steps here too such as getting blurbs and getting cover art but thankfully many of these can be done concurrently with the other steps timewise….
The low-rated, Nancy Drew spinoff only launched on May 31 and has aired six episodes to date. The series, which features a predominantly Black cast, started off as an unconventional backdoor pilot, with only Tian Richards (as Tom) getting an introduction on Nancy Drew last season. The rest of the characters were cast after the project was picked up to series in August.
We hear CBS Studios, which is behind Tom Swift, is trying to extend the options on the cast, which expire today, and plans to shop the series elsewhere.
The CW brass have said that they like the show creatively. The cancellation is said to be performance-based as Tom Swift is among the CW’s least watched series on linear, with 535K viewers in Live+7, as well as on streaming….
A series adaptation of Field of Dreams has struck out at Peacock, The Hollywood Reporter has learned.
The Mike Schur-created drama based on the 1989 Kevin Costner-starring baseball-focused film was picked up straight to series in August 2021 but will not stream on the platform, according to a source with knowledge.
Universal Television, where Schur’s Fremulon shingle holds an overall deal, is in the process of talking to interested buyers.
Schur is the creator of NBC’s The Good Place, along with serving as the co-creator of Parks and Recreation, Brooklyn Nine-Nine and Rutherford Falls. Among other credits, he is an executive producer on HBO Max’s Emmy-winning Hacks and Freevee’s upcoming Primo….
(10) 124C41+. Holden Karnosky’s article “The Track Record of Futurists Seems … Fine” at Cold Takes tries to find another way of testing whether it would be a waste of time to put artificial intelligence to work as futurists. One idea was to look at the futures posited by some famous sf writers.
…The idea is something like: “Even if we can’t identify a particular weakness in arguments about key future events, perhaps we should be skeptical of our own ability to say anything meaningful at all about the long-run future. Hence, perhaps we should forget about theories of the future and focus on reducing suffering today, generally increasing humanity’s capabilities, etc.”
But are people generally bad at predicting future events? Including thoughtful people who are trying reasonably hard to be right? If we look back at prominent futurists’ predictions, what’s the actual track record? How bad is the situation?
…Recently, I worked with Gavin Leech and Misha Yagudin at Arb Research to take another crack at this. I tried to keep things simpler than with past attempts – to look at a few past futurists who (a) had predicted things “kind of like” advances in AI (rather than e.g. predicting trends in world population); (b) probably were reasonably thoughtful about it; but (c) are very clearly not “just selected on those who are famous because they got things right.” So, I asked Arb to look at predictions made by the “Big Three” science fiction writers of the mid-20th century: Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, and Robert Heinlein.
These are people who thought a lot about science and the future, and made lots of predictions about future technologies – but they’re famous for how entertaining their fiction was at the time, not how good their nonfiction predictions look in hindsight. I selected them by vaguely remembering that “the Big Three of science fiction” is a thing people say sometimes, googling it, and going with who came up – no hunting around for lots of sci-fi authors and picking the best or worst.2
Alan Baumler kept score while reading the article:
One (Asimov) who looks quite impressive – plenty of misses, but a 50% hit rate on such nonobvious predictions seems pretty great.
One (Heinlein) who looks pretty unserious and inaccurate.
One (Clarke) who’s a bit hard to judge but seems pretty solid overall (around half of his predictions look to be right, and they tend to be pretty nonobvious).
(11) MEMORY LANE.
1972 – [By Cat Eldridge.] Yes, I know I wrote up Bewitched earlier this year. Or at least I think II did. I do lose track after a while. At any rate, tonight we’ve come to eulogize its ending fifty years ago on this evening. The show aired from September 17, 1964 to July 1, 1972 on ABC for two hundred and fifty-four episodes — seventy-four in black-and-white for the first two years, 1964 to 1966) and one hundred eighty in color for the final three years, 1966 to 1972.
I cannot say that I’ve watched all of the series, but I’ve watched a fair amount of it and it will unashamedly admit that I really do like it. It’s not a complicated series, nor a particularly deep series, but it’s both fun and charming, and it is inoffensive.
So why did Bewitched come to an end? Was it the ratings? That certainly was part of that problem as by by the end of the next-to-last season the ratings for it had noticeably dropped and the show did not even rank in the list of the top thirty programs. But that wasn’t the actual reason it got cancelled.
That was down to Elizabeth Montgomery who had grown tired of the series and wanted to move on to new roles. Well, they didn’t happen. The only thing she was on Password, a game show where she was a celebrity contestant for nearly ninety episodes.
She died at aged sixty-two of an untimely diagnosed cancer.
(12) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]
Born July 1, 1934 — Jean Marsh, 88. She was married to Jon Pertwee but it was before either were involved in Whovian affairs. She first appeared alongside The First Doctor in “The Crusade” as Lady Joanna, the sister of Richard I (The Lionheart). She returned later that year as companion Sara Kingdom in “The Daleks’ Master Plan”. And she’d return yet again during the time of the Seventh Doctor in “Battlefield” as Morgana Le Fay. She’s also in Unearthly Stranger, Dark Places, Return to Oz, Willow as Queen Bavmorda and The Changeling.
Born July 1, 1935 — David Prowse. The physical embodiment of Darth Vader in the original Star Wars trilogy. Ok, it’s been a very long time since I saw Casino Royale but what was Frankenstein’s Creation doing there, the character he played in his first ever role? That he then played the role in The Horror of Frankenstein and Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell, Hammer Films a few years later surprises me not. He shows up in Gilliam’s Jabberwocky according to IMDB as Red Herring and Black Knights (and no I’ve no idea what that means). Finally he’s the executioner in The People That Time Forgot, a film that’s very loosely based off of several Burroughs novels. (Died 2020.)
Born July 1, 1942 — Genevieve Bujold, 80. We would have had a rather different look on Voyager if things had played out as the producers wished, for Bujold was their first choice to play Janeway. She quit after a day and a half of shooting, with the public reason being she was unaccustomed to the hectic pace of television filming. What the real reason was we will never know.
Born July 1, 1952 — Dan Aykroyd, 70. Though best known as Dr. Raymond Stantz in the original Ghostbusters films (which he wrote with Harold Raimis though he himself came up with the Ghostbusters concept), Ackroyd actually showed up in his first genre role a year earlier in Twilight Zone: The Movie as Passenger / Ambulance Driver. He’s reprised his role in Ghostbusters: Afterlife. And he was the narrator of the Hotel Paranormal series that just ended.
Born July 1, 1955 — Robby the Robot, aged, well, 67. Yes, this is this official birthday of the robot in Forbidden Planet, which debuted a year later. Over the years he would also be seen is such films and series as The Invisible Boy,Invasion of the Neptune Men, The Twilight Zone, Lost In Space, The Addams Family,Wonder Woman and Gremlins. He was in a 2006 commercial for AT&T. Well very, very briefly.
Born July 1, 1964 — Charles Coleman Finlay, 58. The Traitor to the Crown series is his best known work. His first story, “Footnotes”, was published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction where many of his stories have since been published. Editor for six years of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction until February of last year. At the World Fantasy Awards in 2021 he received the Special Award – Professional for editing The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction.
Born July 1, 1981 — Genevieve Valentine, 41. Author of the superb Persona novel and also she scripted a Catwoman series, working with artists Garry Brown and David Messina. Her first novel, Mechanique: A tale of the Circus Tresaulti, won the Crawford Award for a first fantasy novel. She scripted a run of Xena: Warrior Princess, and scripted Batman & Robin Eternal as well.
(13) COMICS SECTION.
Non Sequitur shows what would happen if Hollywood added “improvements” to Noah’s Ark. (Which, of course, they’ve already done, but play along with the joke.)
(14) AMAZON PRIME TEASER TRAILER FOR PAPER GIRLS. [Item by Daniel Dern.] The comic book Paper Girls — which involves time travel among other tropes, so it’s inarguably science fiction — which I may have stumbled on either browsing my library’s “new graphic novels” or during the year-ish I subscribed to ComiXology’s monthly streaming digital comics service, or a mix, is about to be an Amazon Prime series, per this trailer I just saw:
It looks promising, to say the least.
Want to read ’em first? If your public library (or interlibrary loan) doesn’t have them, you can e-borrow/read issues 1-30 free through HooplaDigital.com — either as Volumes 1-6, or in 3 borrows (remember, Hoopla allows a set # borrows/month) by going for the Deluxe Edition Books (10 issues each), as this search shows.
Captain Robert A. Lewis, the co-pilot of the B-29 Superfortress called the Enola Gay, wrote those immortal words shortly after 8:16 a.m. on Aug. 6, 1945, moments after he and his crewmates dropped the atomic bomb on the citizens of Hiroshima. The course of history changed at that precise moment: A beautiful day exploded into a blinding bright light, a nuclear fireball leveled a city, at least 100,000 died, and a world war neared its end.
And there, high above it all yet so much a part of the devastation below, was Robert Lewis to chronicle every spectacular and awful moment. He was among the dozen Enola Gay crewmen who delivered the 15-kiloton bomb codenamed “Little Boy” to Japan and the only person aboard who kept a detailed account of the top-secret mission that changed the world.
Lewis’ 11-page chronicle of those few minutes is among the most important documents of the 20th century, a harrowing and oft-heartbreaking account of those very moments between the pre-atomic and post-atomic world – before Hiroshima was struck by the noiseless flash, consumed by fire and swallowed by a mushroom cloud. The public has not seen it since it sold in 2002 during a famous auction of publisher Malcolm Forbes’ American historical documents.
(16) COULD WE DECODE ALIEN PHYSICS? [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Matt O’Dowd at PBS Space Time asks “Could We Decode Alien Physics?”
How hard can it really be to decode alien physics and engineering? It’s gotta map to our own physics – I mean, we live in the same universe. We start by noticing that the alien technology seems to use good ol’ fashioned electronics, even if it is insanely complex. We know this because the particle carried by the alien circuitry looks like the electron. We decide this through a process of elimination.
(17) FOR YOUR VIEWING PLEASURE. JustWatch tracked themoviedb.org data to measure “Top 10 Sci-Fi Movies and TV Shows in the US in June.”
Rank*
Movies
TV shows
1
Everything Everywhere All at Once
Obi-Wan Kenobi
2
Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom
For All Mankind
3
Jurassic World
Severance
4
Spider-Man: No Way Home
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
5
Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness
Westworld
6
Morbius
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds
7
Jurassic Park
Doctor Who
8
Ghostbusters: Afterlife
Night Sky
9
Crimes of the Future
The Man Who Fell to Earth
10
Moonfall
The Twilight Zone
*Based on JustWatch popularity score. Genre data is sourced from themoviedb.org
For the past three years, a tiny loaf-of-bread-sized spacecraft with gigantic wings has been sailing on sunbeams in low Earth orbit. LightSail 2 has far exceeded its life expectancy and proven that solar sails can indeed be used to fly spacecraft. But its journey around our planet is sadly coming to an end, as Earth’s atmosphere drags the spacecraft downward where it will eventually burn up in atmospheric flames.
The Planetary Society’s LightSail 2 launched in June 2019 and unfurled its 344-square-foot (32-square-meter) solar sail a month later. Just two weeks after spreading its wings, LightSail 2 gained 2 miles (3.2 kilometers) of altitude, making this experiment a success….
(19) NIMOY THEATER UPDATE. A new era for the Center for the Art of Performance UCLA is underway as they continue to develop the UCLA Nimoy Theater. “The Nimoy sets new horizon for the arts community”. You can see an overview of the project here.
Located near the UCLA campus on Westwood Boulevard, The Nimoy is a reimagining of the historic Crest Theater as a flexible, state-of-the-art performance space.
Opening in late March 2023, the intimately-scaled venue is named for artist, actor, director and philanthropist Leonard Nimoy. Shawmut Construction has been working steadily to renovate the venue, which will be equipped with new and green technologies to support the creation and presentation of innovative work.
The Nimoy will be a home for artists representing a broad diversity of voices, viewpoints, ideas and creative expressions in music, dance, theater, literary arts, digital media arts and collaborative disciplines. The inaugural season will feature a large slate of amazing shows, including new work by the legendary Kronos Quartet, “live documentarian” filmmaker Sam Green, and a collaboration between two essential musical voices of Los Angeles, Quetzal and Perla Batalla.
(20) VIDEO OF THE DAY. [By Martin Morse Wooster.] Alasdair Beckett-King asks, “What if Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson got email from spammers claiming to be “sexy women from Moldova?” “Hot Detectives in Your Area”.
[Thanks to Andrew Porter, Michael Toman, Cat Eldridge, Curt Phillips, Daniel Dern, Alan Baumler, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie. Mike Kennedy, Martin Morse Wooster, JJ, and John King Tarpinian, and Chris Barkley for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Andrew (not Werdna).]
[Editor’s Note: The following message from Bob Madle was co-authored with his daughter, Jane. She approved it being shared with fan groups who might be able to assist. The announcement concerns his copies of the five issues of Science Fiction, a mimeographed fanzine published by Superman creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster beginning in October 1932. You may recall that Madle, now 101 years old, is the fan who named The Hugos.]
An Important Message from Bob Madle
PLEASE BE ON THE LOOKOUT!
We are searching for my copies of “Science Fiction” Fanzine #1-5 (1932-33), Jerry Siegel – Editor. Issue #3 contains the first appearance of Superman
Hello to My Friends in Fandom:
I recently discovered that many of my fanzines from the 30s and 40s, including all five issues of “Science Fiction” had been stolen from my collection. The theft occurred sometime prior to the start of the pandemic – before March 2020.
I’m attempting to track down the “Science Fiction” fanzines since these are so rare and any sale would be notable. if you hear of a set for sale or are contacted about them, please let me know.
As most of you know, these are extremely rare; there are only a few copies in existence. This is a very special item and means a lot to me, so again, I would appreciate it if you hear anything about a sale or purchase of them, please contact me.
…However, not all Asian authors writing fantasy feel at home with the genre label. When I reached out to Rebecca F. Kuang, author of The Poppy War, a Hugo-nominated fantasy trilogy inspired by Chinese history, she said that she finds “Asian fantasy” to be a reductive category.
“I think that Asian doesn’t really make a lot of sense, either as a literary category or as an identity category. Obviously, there are a lot of different things that fall under the subcategory of Asian, including East Asian, including South Asians, Southeast Asian, Pacific Islander, for example,” she says. “So when we call works just blanket ‘Asian,’ that belies an entire world of difference.”
So while the growing popularity of Asian fantasy marks a positive turn towards a broader and more inclusive range of experiences in fantasy, it also raises important questions: Does it actually make sense to group novels by a geographic region, especially one that encompasses billions of people? Does the label “Asian fantasy” help or hurt Asian authors? Well, the answer depends on who you’re asking….
(2) SOMTOW ON SCREEN. The Maestro – A Symphony of Terror, from Somtow Sucharitkul (in the title role) and filmmaker Paul Spurrier, opens July 14 in Bangkok at Central World SF Cinema (one of the major movie chains in Thailand). From there it will do the festival circuit, maybe book a few weird international gigs, and onto some kind of streaming platform, Somtow predicts.
The Maestro tells the story of a misunderstood genius with profound psychological problems. Rejected by the European musical establishment, he returns to his native Thailand and gets a job teaching music in a youth program. Stalked by an obsessed opera singer, ridiculed by his public, his big premiere preempted by a world-renowned conducting mediocrity, he begins a descent into madness. Accompanied by street busking violinist and a prodigy pianist from a dysfunctional family, he sets out to build a musical utopia in the wilderness to bring his transcendent vision to life … only, inevitably, it all goes horribly wrong.
(3) IF IT AIN’T BROKE, DON’T FIX IT. Hugo Book Club Blog compared the official list of 1963 Hugo Award nominees with a copy of the ballot and found something was missing. And there unquestionably was. But stay tuned for the rest of the story….
They even convinced The Hugo Awards official site to enter a correction:
Note: We previously listed Burn, Witch, Burn (1962) (alt: Night of the Eagle) ([Anglo-Amalgamated/Independent Artists] Directed by Sidney Hayers; Screenplay by Charles Beaumont & Richard Matheson and George Baxt; based on the novel Conjure Wife by Fritz Leiber) as a finalist for the 1963 Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation; however, a copy of the 1963 Hugo Award final ballot that we received on June 2, 2021 does not include this work as a finalist.
And yet when you look at a scanned copy of the 1963 Worldcon Program BookBurn, Witch, Burn is included. (Remember – 1962 is the eligibility year.)
In the DRAMATIC PRODUCTION category, the top four for 1962 were:
TV series: Twilight Zone
Movie: Last Year at Marienbad
Movie: The Day the Earth Caught Fire
Movie: Burn, Witch, Burn
Why is there a discrepancy between the Program Book and the official use-no-other, no-write-ins-allowed postcard ballot? Because someone made a mistake while typing the stencil for the 1963 ballot. Chair George Scithers blushingly told what happened in the Worldcon runner’s manual he wrote after the con —DisCon 1 Guide: Introduction:
…To encourage voting, we used printed, return addressed, postage prepaid postcards with the names of the nominees thereon. This of course was expensive; about $16, plus printing. On the other hand, it did improve the number of votes (about 226 people voted in the final poll, not counting late votes) and it did insure against anyone not a member sending in a forged card. For future cons, I’d suggest prepaid postcards for both nominations and final votes. Be careful and proofread these final ballots; we left “Burn, Witch, Burn” off our postcard list (4) [If George wasn’t accepting the principle of Collective Responsibility, this would read properly: “Dick Eney left ‘Burn, Witch, Burn’ off …”], an omission which was very embarrassing indeed.
When I started editing an anthology of SF stories centered around alien life, each accompanied by a short essay on the science of the story, naturally I was curious about what sciences or technologies inspire the contributing authors, how their process works and how they rely on technology. Conducting a mini-interview with each author, I asked, among other things, whether there’s any technology they can’t imagine to live without. Think for a moment what it would be for you. Some piece of 21st century technology, or something vital developed thousands of years ago? Something to guide your writing process, or indispensable in your life regardless of the craft?
Many writers (including myself, after all) can’t imagine working without computers. Rich Larson says: “Over half my day is spent on my netbook.” He uses it for around ten hours of writing and other work, and then for recreation and socialization. At night, its USB port powers the small fan that lets him sleep. “It’s basically a vital organ!”
“My Bose QC 35 wireless headphones,” says Tobias S. Buckell. They help him create a focusing space around himself. “The ritual of turning on noise canceling and hearing the world around me drop into background; it’s this trigger for focus that really helps me,” he adds….
(5) PURPLE EATER PEOPLE. Inspired by the park’s chicken dinners and boysenberry pie – and a few less legal substances — Rolly Crump’s “Legendary theme park ride resurfaces at Knott’s Berry Farm” reports the Los Angeles Times. “Knott’s Bear-y Tales: Return to the Fair” has been recreated after being out of service for a generation. Crump, the 91-year-old designer, also helped shape It’s a Small World, the Enchanted Tiki Room and the Haunted Mansion at Disneyland,
… “Everyone comes together at the fair at the end,” Merritt says. “All the characters you saw in the previous scene make a new appearance, doing something different and fun. It’s a big room. It takes up almost half of the show building.”
Crump’s theme park designs were known for near constant movement. The figures may not have been as advanced as those at Disneyland, but every mechanical creature was moving. Today’s theme park fans may want to picture the grand musical and animal finale of Disneyland’s soon-to-be rethemed Splash Mountain when trying to picture the closing seconds of Bear-y Tales.
Describes Merritt, “In the middle of the room, there’s a big balloon coming from the ceiling where the Bear-y Family are going up and down, and there’s music, there’s Dr. Fox selling his Weird Juice, there’s puppets and there’s a frog jumping contest. There’s musicians, there’s a rabbit who’s walking on wire, there’s jugglers. It’s too much. It’s sensory overload.”
…The more one digs into the scenes of the Bear-y Tales ride, the more detail and uniqueness one uncovers.
One of Crump’s first jobs at Disney was to partner with illusionist Yale Gracey on potential effects for the Haunted Mansion, so it’s perhaps no surprise that Crump wanted a sense of magic throughout Bear-y Tales. The ride was liberal in its use of projections and Pepper’s ghost-like effects. There were floating instruments, hovering candle tips and one neat trick that Merritt recalls involving an adorable mouse suddenly appearing out of a candle holder in midair.
But perhaps the real reason Bear-y Tales had such a grip on those who rode it is because in some ways it represents the kind of ride that doesn’t really exist anymore. Crump’s original had pies — and pie scents — but was little more than a story about a bunch of nomadic, bohemian animals.
“It’s super unique. It was such a snapshot in time,” says Nix. “When you look at the pictures, it wasn’t terribly advanced. The animatronics were simple, but there were a lot of them. You just felt like you were in these scenes and places.”…
(6) VIRTUAL 4TH STREET. Elizabeth Bear has made public an edition of her Throwanotherbearinthecanoe newsletter: “What we’ve been doing around here…” After fulminating against the latest “improvement” of Instagram, she alerts readers to her coming appearance at a virtual con:
….Anyway, speaking of things to do on the internet that are actually fun, there will be a Virtual 4th Street Fantasy convention this year. I’ve recorded a panel for it (“Personalizing the Apocalypse”) with a remarkable cast of brilliant people, and we will be doing a live Q&A for attendees on the weekend of June 18th.
If you would like to “attend,” you can register here! Moneys collected go toward paying off hotel expenses, and if you would like to make a donation, the convention is a 401(c) nonprofit organization, which means donations are tax-deductible.
Doubleday will publish a new collection of Margaret Atwood’s essays, Burning Questions: Essays 2004-2021, on March 1, 2022. U.S. rights were acquired from Karolina Sutton at Curtis Brown.
…The selection of more than 50 essays, the publisher said, “seeks answers to burning questions such as: Why do people everywhere, in all cultures, tell stories? How much of yourself can you give away without evaporating? How can we live on our planet? Is it true? And is it fair? What do zombies have to do with authoritarianism?”…
(8) TOMORROW, AND TOMORROW, AND TOMORROW. John Hertz celebrates Bob Madle’s 101st birthday with this poem:
All our yesterdays Live on, or some of them do, In the fannish mind, Vitally moving new deeds Even as we joke of them.
(9) MEDIA BIRTHDAY.
June 2, 1950 – On this day in 1950, Rocketship X-M premiered. The film was produced and directed by Kurt Neumann. The screenplay was by Orville H. Hampton, Kurt Neumann and Dalton Trumbo (of Johnny Got His Gun fame). It starred Lloyd Bridges, Osa Massen, John Emery, Noah Beery, Jr., Hugh O’Brian, and Morris Ankrum. It was shot on a budget of just ninety-four thousand dollars. It was nominated for the 1951 Retro Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation at the Millennium Philcon when Destination Moon won that Award. Fandom holds it in a higher esteem that audience reviewers at Rotten Tomatoes do who give it a mere fifteen percent rating! Oh, and it was the first SF film to use a theremin in the soundtrack.
(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge and John Hertz.]
Born June 2, 1857 – Karl Gjellerup. In The Pilgrim Kamanita, the Pilgrim meets a strange monk who he does not know is Gautama Buddha. In The World-Roamers, characters re-experience happenings of former eons. In The Holiest Animal, the snake that killed Cleopatra, Odysseus’ dog, Jesus’ donkey, and others, meeting after death, choose as the holiest animal the Buddha’s horse – but he has vanished without a trace, to Nirvana. Nobel Prize in Literature. (Died 1919) [JH]
Born June 2, 1899 – Lotte Reiniger. Pioneer of Silhouette animation. Animated intertitles and wooden rats for Paul Wegener’s Pied Piper of Hamelin (1918); a falcon for Fritz Lang’s Nibelungen (Part 1 – Siegfried, 1924). Her own Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926) is the oldest known surviving feature-length animated film. Doctor Dolittle and His Animals, 1928. Her early version of a mutiplane camera preceded Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks by a decade. Great Cross of the Order of Merit of the Fed’l Republic of Germany, 1979. (Died 1981) [JH]
Born June 2, 1915 – Lester del Rey. Fan, pro, short-order cook. Used many names, not least of which was Ramon Felipe San Juan Mario Silvio Enrico Smith Heathcourt-Brace Sierra y Alvarez-del-Rey de los Verdes. Two dozen novels alone and with others; a hundred shorter stories (see the 2-vol. Selected Short Stories); half a dozen non-fiction books; Skylark Award, SFWA (Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America) Grand Master; reviews for Analog, features editor for Galaxy; SF editor for Ballantine; with Judy-Lynn del Rey and after her death, Del Rey Books. (Died 1993) [JH]
Born June 2, 1920 – Bob Madle, age 101. He may be Oldest of All. He was at Nycon I the 1st Worldcon; he named the Hugo Awards. TAFF (Trans-Atlantic Fan Fund) delegate. Fan Guest of Honor at SunCon the 35th Worldcon. First Fandom Hall of Fame. Moskowitz Award for collecting. Big Heart (our highest service award). This post from last year includes photos and a summary in his own words. [JH]
Born June 2, 1929 — Norton Juster. Author of The Phantom Tollbooth, it is said that he met Jules Feiffer who illustrated that work when he was taking his trash out. There is of course the superb film that followed. And let’s not forget The Dot and the Line: A Romance in Lower Mathematics, a work well worth spending an evening reading. (Died 2021.) (CE)
Born June 2, 1921 — Virginia Kidd. Literary agent, writer and editor, who worked mostly in SF and related fields. She represented R.A. Lafferty, Ursula K. Le Guin, Anne McCaffrey, Judith Merril, and Gene Wolfe. She was married to James Blish, and she published a handful of genre short fiction. Wolfe modeled Ann Schindler, a character in Castleview, in large part on Kidd. (Died 2003.) (CE)
Born June 2, 1937 — Sally Kellerman, 83. Here for her role as Elizabeth Dehner in “Where No Man Has Gone Before”, the second pilot for Star Trek. Her first genre role was in an episode of the Outer Limits, “The Bellero Shield”. She shows up in the Invaders in the “Labyrinth” episode. Her last genre appearance was on the Ray Bradbury Theater in the “Exorcism” episode. She also appeared in the Lost Horizon film. (CE)
Born June 2, 1941 — Stacy Keach, 80. Though best known for playing hard-boiled Detective Mike Hammer, he’s got a long association with our genre starting with The Mountain of the Cannibal God, an Italian horror film. Next up for him was Class of 1999, followed by voicing both Carl Beaumont / Voice of Phantasm in Batman: Mask of the Phantasm, a film I really, really like. More horror, and a really silly title, awaited him in Children of the Corn 666: Isaac’s Return. Whereas The Hollow has a tasteful title, the Man with the Screaming Brain does not. Storm War, also known as Weather Wars, is SF. And then there is Sin City: A Dame to Kill which is a rather nice piece of film making. And yes, he’s been in a televised version of Macbeth playing Banquo. (CE)
Born June 2, 1948 – Leigh Edmonds, age 73. Founder of ANZAPA (Australia – New Zealand Amateur Press Ass’n). Melbourne SF Club Achievement Award. First DUFF (Down Under Fan Fund) delegate, published Emu Tracks Over America. First A-NZ Administrator of GUFF (Get-Up-and-over Fan Fund, or Going Under Fan Fund, in alternate years). Helped organize 10th Australian natcon (i.e. national convention); Fan Guest of Honour (with Valma Brown) at 30th. Two Ditmars for Best Fanzine, three for Best Fanwriter. [JH]
Born June 2, 1959 – Lloyd Penney, age 62. Thirty years on Ad Astra con committees (Toronto); Chair 1993 & 1994. “Royal Canadian Mounted Starfleet” (with Yvonne Penney & others – and song) in Chicon IV Masquerade (40th Worldcon). Also with Yvonne, Chairs of SMOFcon VI (Secret Masters Of Fandom, as Bruce Pelz said “a joke-nonjoke-joke”; con-runners’ con); CUFF (Canadian Unity Fan Fund) delegates, published Penneys Up the River; Fan Guests of Honor, Loscon 34. Prolific loccer (loc or LoC = letter of comment, the blood of fanzines); 5 FAAn (Fan Activity Achievement) Awards. [JH]
Born June 2, 1965 — Sean Stewart, 56. Fantastic author whose Galveston novel that won the World Fantasy Award I highly recommend, as well as the Resurrection Man novels. I’ve not read his most recent set of novels, The Cathy’s Book series, but it’s take on augmented reality sounds intriguing. (CE)
Born June 2, 1973 – Carlos Acosta, age 48. Cuban director of Birmingham Royal Ballet; before that, 17 years at The Royal Ballet, many other companies. Prix Benois de la Danse. Commander of the Order of the British Empire for services to ballet. Besides dancing in many fantasies (Afternoon of a Faun, Apollo, The Nutcracker, Swan Lake) – and finding time for a wife and three children – he’s written a magic-realism novel, Pig’s Foot. Memoir, No Way Home. [JH]
Born June 2, 1979 — Morena Baccarin, 42. Very long genre history starting with portraying Inara Serra in Firefly and Serenity; Adria in the Stargate SG-1 series and the Stargate: The Ark of Truth; Anna in the 2009 version of the series V; Vanessa in the Deadpool franchise; and Dr. Leslie Thompkins in Gotham. She did an exemplary job of voicing Black Canary in Justice League Unlimited. (CE)
DC Chief Creative Officer and Publisher Jim Lee discusses his work in celebration of Asian-Pacific American Heritage Month. He will appear in conversation with illustrator Bernard Chang (“Generations Forged”) and writers Sarah Kuhn (“Shadow of the Batgirl”) and Minh Lê (“Green Lantern: Legacy”). This event is moderated by former National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature Gene Luen Yang (“Superman Smashes the Klan”).
…The Hamilton Ventura has always been part of the Men in Black movies. Back in 1997, when the first installment (Men in Black) hit the cinema, the choice of Agents J and K was the classic Hamilton Ventura Quartz (ref. H24411732). Five years later, in 2002’s Men in Black II, the Ventura Chrono Quartz (ref. H24412732) was chosen in the starring role instead. The next decade saw those two watches reunite on-screen for Men in Black III (2012), as well as introducing the Hamilton Ventura XXL.
Men in Black: International will build on the cult following enjoyed by the Ventura since its launch in ’57. The new film focuses on two agents attempting to protect the world from a mole within their own organization, while dressed in their classic suits and armed with their essential neuralyzer pens. Helping Agent M and Agent H on their mission are the classic Hamilton Ventura Quartz (M), and the Hamilton Ventura Automatic with a cut-out dial and brown leather strap (H), respectively….
(13) JEOPARDY! Andrew Porter watched a contestant miss this one on last night’s Jeopardy!
Final Jeopardy; category: Around the World
Answer: In the 1860s, a zoologist proposed that this island was once part of a lost continent he dubbed Lemuria.
Wrong question: What is Galapagos?
Correct question: What is Madagascar?
(14) JDA SUSPENDED FROM TWITTER AND FACEBOOK. Straight from the horse’s…mouth.
The sudden appearance of a small hole in a robotic arm aboard the international space station (ISS) has brought renewed attention to the danger posed by space junk.
Mission managers discovered the puncture during an inspection of the exterior of the spacecraft on 12 May. The Canadian space agency (CSA), which operates the arm, described it as a “lucky strike” that did not affect operations or endanger the seven astronauts in orbit aboard the station.
It is not known what kind of object struck the space station or when it happened. But analysts say the incident is a reminder of the proliferating amount of junk circling Earth and the risk that poses as launches and satellites in orbit increase.
“There’s a lot of stuff out there traveling at over 17,500mph and obviously it can do a lot of damage,” John Crassidis, SUNY distinguished professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at the University of Buffalo, told the Guardian….
(16) SABERKITTENS. These prehistoric credentials probably looked pretty cute as long as you weren’t a mammoth. “Sabercats Raised Their Kittens for Years” affirms Smithsonian Magazine.
…Two new studies published this year have underscored the fact that sabercats required some of the same family ties that today’s big cats rely upon. Some young sabercats may have stayed with their parents for two years or more as they waited for their impressive fangs to come in. Those parents likely played an essential role in teaching their saberkittens how to catch and eat food, including dragging mammoth legs home to chew on. Together, these studies help highlight how sabercat behavior evolved to cope with a world in which many carnivorous species—from dire wolves to giant bears—competed for prey.
(17) WATCH YOUR SIXTH. What’s more dangerous, a sabertooth or the Doctor? Artist JohannesVIII did this piece of Doctor Who‘s Sixth Doctor (Colin Baker) as a cat!
[Thanks to Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, Ben Bird Person, John A Arkansawyer, Martin Morse Wooster, JJ, Michael Toman, John King Tarpinian, Cat Eldridge, and John Hertz for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to contributing editor of the day Andrew (not Werdna).]
