Pixel Scroll 4/30/23 I Demand That The Emergency Pixel System Be Activated Immediately 

(1) ROAD TRIP. Connie Willis told her Facebook readers all about attending the 2023 Jack Williamson Lectureship in mid-April:

…This year’s guest of honor was Arkady Martine, and she brought her wife, Vivian Shaw, with her, so we got two guests for one. They were great, and so were the panels, which the Lectureship features. I especially loved the one on Artificial Intelligence, which focused on the new dangers and possibilities of ChatGPT, and one on worldbuilding. I also loved Cordelia’s lecture on a very out-of-the-ordinary experience she had while working at the Santa Clara County Crime lab. Unlike the usual investigation of shoeprints, surveillance tapes, cell phones, etc., she suddenly found herself in a convoy with a SWAT team in L.A., driving a coworker’s car without the lights on in an attempt to arrest a bunch of human traffickers….

(2) SAWYER GETS LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD. Robert J. Sawyer was presented with the L. Ron Hubbard Lifetime Achievement Award at the Writers and Illustrators of the Future award banquet in LA on April 28. In his acceptance speech Sawyer describes career decisions where he followed his heart in ironic terms as if they had been mistakes. But they weren’t mistakes, were they.

…Many writers do media tie-ins or work in other people’s universes. My first agent tried to steer me in that direction, too, getting me a three-book contract in the STAR WARS universe. But I bailed out; I just couldn’t bring myself to play in somebody else’s sandbox.

And then I screwed up AGAIN: my second novel was called FAR-SEER, and, at its end, I gave the protagonist, a talking dinosaur named Afsan, a heroic death scene. Well, when I sent the manuscript to my agent, he said I was nuts for killing the main character: “Rob, baby,” he said — that’s how agents talk — “Rob, baby, this could be an ongoing series, and, if not a cash cow, then certainly a monetary Megalosaurus!”

So, Afsan got a reprieve and I forced out two more books about the lovable lizard. But, as before, I just couldn’t stand it; at the end of the third book, I took the same escape route Charlton Heston did from the PLANET OF THE APES sequels: I destroyed the entire planet!…

(3) BEM IN A FLASH. Cora Buhlert has had a flash story called “Bug-eyed Monsters and the Women Who Love Them” published at Way Station, a brand-new space opera magazine, which she says doesn’t have an actual issue out yet.

Captain Crash Martigan of the rocket scout squad was on patrol, protecting New Pluto City and its inhabitants from bug-eyed monsters.

Of course, bug-eyed monsters wasn’t their real name. No, the creatures had a long and official Latinate name that no one could remember nor pronounce. So the colonists took to calling them bug-eyed monsters, because that’s what they looked like….

(4) IS ANALOG USEFUL AGAIN? [Item by Mike Kennedy.] Back in the day (the 1970s when I was an Electrical Engineering student at the University of Alabama), I had occasion to build a special-purpose hybrid analog/digital computer. The only reason for its existence was so high school students visiting us as prospective UA engineering students could play tic-tac-toe and see EE at work. It was used one day, then stripped down for parts. The very idea of a programmable analog component gets my EE juices flowing a little bit, though it’s certainly nowhere enough to entice me out of retirement. There have always been problems for which analog computation was perfectly suited. But, as the article below notes, building those damn things is no joke, and every time the problem changes, the design changes. Or, perhaps, the tense should be changed to, well, “changed.“ This could become a very exciting field going forward.  “The Unbelievable Zombie Comeback of Analog Computing” in WIRED.

When old tech dies, it usually stays dead. No one expects rotary phones or adding machines to come crawling back from oblivion. Floppy diskettes, VHS tapes, cathode-ray tubes—they shall rest in peace. Likewise, we won’t see old analog computers in data centers anytime soon. They were monstrous beasts: difficult to program, expensive to maintain, and limited in accuracy.

Or so I thought. Then I came across this confounding statement:

Bringing back analog computers in much more advanced forms than their historic ancestors will change the world of computing drastically and forever.

Seriously?

I found the prediction in the preface of a handsome illustrated book titled, simply, Analog Computing. Reissued in 2022, it was written by the German mathematician Bernd Ulmann—who seemed very serious indeed.

I’ve been writing about future tech since before WIRED existed and have written six books explaining electronics. I used to develop my own software, and some of my friends design hardware. I’d never heard anyone say anything about analog, so why would Ulmann imagine that this very dead paradigm could be resurrected? And with such far-reaching and permanent consequences?

I felt compelled to investigate further….

(5) HOWARD DAYS. Ken Lizzi shares a report and several photos of the Robert E. Howard Days, which took place in April this year: “Howard Days 2023. Plus Savage Journal Entry 41.”

I made the Hajj, the Pilgrimage, to Cross Plains, Texas this weekend to visit the Robert E. Howard museum. Not coincidentally, it was also the weekend of the 2023 edition of Howard Days. I am, to be blunt, tired. It is only a five hour drive from Casa Lizzi, which is why I had no excuse to put off the visit. Still, on top of non-stop activity and limited sleep, that drive back proved less pleasant than the lovely drive out: putting a Gulf Coast thunder storm behind me Thursday morning as I wended my way north and west deep into the heart of Texas, into cattle and old oil boom country to the AirBnB I shared with Bryan Murphy and Deuce Richardson….

(6) APPENDIX N. The good folks at Goodman Games continue their articles on SFF authors listed in Appendix N:

Ngo Vinh-Hoi profiles Jack Williamson: “Adventures in Fiction: Jack Williamson”.

In the storied list of Appendix N authors, there is one name that encapsulates nearly the entire course of modern American science fiction and fantasy: Jack Williamson. John Stewart Williamson was born on April 29th, 1908 in an adobe hut in what was then still the Arizona Territory. Seeking to better themselves, the Williamson family travelled by horse-drawn covered wagon to New Mexico in 1915, where Williamson recalled that they “homesteaded in Eastern New Mexico in 1916 after the good land had been claimed. We were living below the poverty line, struggling for survival.”

This isolated, hardscrabble existence continued throughout Williamson’s entire youth, but his imagination and inquisitive mind helped him to endure…. 

Jeff Goad profiles Fletcher Pratt: “Adventures in Fiction: Fletcher Pratt”.

The Appendix N is a list of prolific authors of science fiction and fantasy. But Fletcher Pratt is not one of them, at least not in comparison to most of the authors on the list. He primarily wrote historical nonfiction about the Civil War, Napoleon, naval history, rockets, and World War II. So why is Fletcher Pratt listed in the Appendix N and why does he have the coveted “et al” listed after The Blue Star?

Well, digging a bit deeper into his writings and his career, it is no surprise that Gary Gygax was smitten with this fellow….

(7) MEMORY LANE.

1999[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

Our Beginning this Scroll comes courtesy of Richard Wadholm. Green Tea was a novella first published in Asimov’s Science Fiction in the October-November 1999 issue. It was shortlisted for the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award. 

Wadholm, a Clarion graduate, had a very brief visit in our corner of things writing one novel, Astronomy, and six stories. None are available at the usual suspects. 

He was, interestingly enough, a contributing writer, to Synapse, the Electronic Music Magazine  which published in the Seventies.

And now for our Beginning…

Friend Beltran, this moment has weighed on me for the past six days. At last we meet.

Will you take tea with me? Not to worry, I am not here to poison you with tainted tea. Not from a beautiful service like this, certainly. This tea kettle is pewter, yes? And the brew pot— terra cotta, in the manner of the great smuggling mandarins of the Blanco Grande? Quite so. I must beg your indulgence for its use. I was very thirsty; I have come a long way to see you.

Perhaps my name escapes you. That is the way in this profession we share. Say that I am your delivery man. Indeed, the item you procured at such dear cost is close to hand.

My fee? Whatever you arranged with the navigator Galvan will suffice. A cup of tea from this excellent terra cotta pot would do nicely. And, if you are not too pressed, the answer to a simple question?

Who was it for, the thing you birthed on our ship? Was it for the mercenaries on Michele D’avinet? Or for the Chinese smugglers who used the glare of D’avinet to hide their passing?

I suppose it doesn’t matter much either way. Whoever your treasure was intended for, they were someone’s enemy, but they were no enemy of Beltran Seynoso’s, yes? And we, the crew of the Hierophant, we were merely witnesses. Our only offense was that we could connect you with the destruction of a little star in the outer reaches of Orion.

I wronged you, my friend. You are indeed a man of pitiless resolve. Sitting here, making tea in your kitchen, in this rambling manse, on this pretty little moon of yours, I underestimated you. I pictured a dilettante, playing at a rough game.

Forgive, forgive.

That story you told our captain, that you represented an Anglo syndicate dealing in—what was it? April pork bellies? We took that for naivete. No one goes from trading in April pork bellies to dealing in ‘Tuesday morning perbladium. Not even the Anglos.

And then there was that improbable load you hired us to turn.

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born April 30, 1913 Jane Rice. Her first story “The Dream” was published in the July 1940 issue of Unknown. Amazingly, she’d publish ten stories there during the War. Her only novel Lucy remains lost due to somewhat mysterious circumstances. Much of her short stories are collected in The Idol of the Flies and Other Stories which is not available in digital form. (Died 2003.)
  • Born April 30, 1920 E. F. Bleiler. An editor, bibliographer and scholar of both sff and detective fiction. He’s responsible in the Forties for co-editing the Best SF Stories with T.E. Dikty. They later edited Best Science-Fiction Stories. He also did such valuable reference guides like The Checklist of Fantastic Literature and The Guide to Supernatural Fiction. (Died 2010.)
  • Born April 30, 1926 Edmund Cooper. Pulpish writer of space opera not for the easily offended. His The Uncertain Midnight has an interesting take on androids but most of his work is frankly misogynistic. And he was quite prolific with over twenty-four novels and a dozen story collections. A lot of his work is available at the usual digital suspects. (Died 1982.)
  • Born April 30, 1934 William Baird Searles. Author and critic. He‘s best remembered for his long-running review work for Asimov’s  where he reviewed books, and Amazing Stories and F&SF where he did film and tv reviews. I’m not familiar with his writings but I’d be interested to know who here has read Reader’s Guide to Science Fiction and Reader’s Guide to Fantasy which he did, as they might be useful to own. (Died 1993.)
  • Born April 30, 1938 Larry Niven, 85. One of my favorite authors to read, be it the Gil Hamilton the Arm stories, Ringworld, Protector, The Mote in God’s Eye with Jerry Pournelle (The Gripping Hand alas didn’t work for me at all), or the the Rainbow Mars stories which I love in the audiobook version. What’s your favorite Niven story? And yes, I did look up his Hugos. “Neutron Star” was his first at NyCon followed by Ringworld at Noreascon 1 and in turn by “Inconstant Moon” (lovely story) the following year at L.A. Con I,  “The Hole Man” (which I don’t remember reading but did listen in preparing this Birthday — most excellent!) at Aussiecon 1 and finally “The Borderland of Sol” novelette at MidAmericaCon. He’s not won a Hugo since 1976 which I admit surprised me.
  • Born April 30, 1968 Adam Stemple, 55. Son of Jane Yolen. One-time vocalist of Boiled in Lead. With Yolen, he’s written the Rock ‘n’ Roll Fairy TalesPay the Piper and Troll Bridge which are worth reading, plus the Seelie Wars trilogy which I’ve not read. He’s also written two Singer of Souls urban fantasies which I remember as engaging. 
  • Born April 30, 1973 Naomi Novik, 50. She wrote the Temeraire series which runs to nine novels so far. Her first book, His Majesty’s Dragon, won the Astounding Award. She most deservedly won the Nebula Award for Best Novel for Uprooted which is a most excellent read. I’ve not yet read her Spinning Silver novel which won a Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Adult Literature, so opinions are welcome. 

(9) COMICS SECTION.

(10) WHAT’S ON THE WAY? John Shirley interviews Charles Stross about The Future in “Optimism Optimized & Pessimism Prodded” at Instant Future.

Q. Will the pace of change overwhelm us? I seem to perceive, behind many of your novels, a writer conflicted about technological advancement; not against it, certainly no luddite, but concerned about its nature. It would seem that we need that advancement—but we’ve failed to develop a protocol for advancing technology intelligently. For one thing, a technology that pollutes is only half-invented. This seems clear in the age of anthropogenic climate change. Should we slow the pace? Can we?

A: I think, going by the news headlines, the pace of change has *already* overwhelmed us. The Tofflers made this case fairly well in their book *Future Shock* back in the 1970s, and that was in a then-stable media environment that wasn’t polluted with memes generated by bad actors (eg. state level disinformation agencies) and chatbots (often just trying to sell something — Ivermectin as a cure for COVID19, for example).

One problem is that we’re nearing the crest of a sigmoid curve of accelerating advances in a new technological area — computing, networking, and information processing. It seems unlikely progress on miniaturization of semiconductors will proceed for many more generations (our densest integrated semiconductor circuits already have tracks and other features on the order of a hundred atoms wide: it’s hard to see how we can shrink mechanisms below the atomic scale). So, just as progress with steam locomotion had tapered off by the 1920s after a brisk acceleration from roughly 1790 through 1870, and aviation surged from the original Wright Flyer and its contemporaries around 1900 to the SR-71 and Boeing 747 by the early 1970s but subsequently stopped getting bigger or faster, we’re approaching an era of consolidation and very slow incremental gains in our IT. People are now exploring the possible ways of monetizing the technologies we’ve acquired over the past few decades, rather than making qualitative breakthroughs. I first saw a virtual reality headset and interface in use at a conference in the early 1990s; the fact that Apple are apparently bringing one to market this summer, and Meta (aka Facebook) sank billions — evidently fruitlessly — into trying to commercialize VR over the past few years, should be a huge warning flag that some technologies just don’t seem to be as useful as people expected.

(11) UPHEAVAL IN THE SIXTIES. [Item by Cora Buhlert.] At Galactic Journey I was talking about some of the 1968 unrest in (West) Germany as well as the 1968 Oberhausen Short Film Festival, where George Lucas won an award for the original short film version of THX-1138 4EB. Also present at the festival was a very young Werner Herzog, which is interesting since Herzog claimed not to be familiar with Star Wars or Lucas, when he guest-starred in The Mandalorian. Of course, Herzog might just have forgotten meeting at a festival Lucas 55 years ago. Oh yes, and there also was a scandal at that festival surrounding a short film with a very upstanding cast member. “[April 14, 1968] In Unquiet Times: The Frankfurt Arson Attacks, the Shooting of Rudi Dutschke and Electronic Labyrinth THX-1138 4EB” at Galactic Journey.

…With West Germany burning and all the terrible things happening here and elsewhere in the world, it’s easy to forget that there are bright spots as well. One of those bright spots is the 14th West German Short Film Days in Oberhausen….

(12) SURVIVING THE RUNWAY. “Louis Vuitton collaborates with the director of Squid Game in a bid to woo South Korea’s elite”Yahoo! has the story.

…The event was dreamed up by Ghesquière and Hwang Dong-hyuk, the director of the hit Netflix series, Squid Game, in which contestants compete in a series of children’s games and are murdered if they lose. He could hardly have found a more effective way of winnowing out weaklings than this runway. HoYeon Jung, a Korean actress who opened the show, took it in her stride. She was probably used to tough conditions having starred in Squid Game….

[Thanks to Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Cora Buhlert, Paul Di Filippo, Lise Andreasen, Chris Barkley, Michael Toman, Cat Eldridge, and Mike Kennedy for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Lis Carey.]

Scary Shorts

They’re just words and they engage only one of the five senses, so how is it that by placing them in the right order an author can scare the hell out of us?

And with Halloween just around the corner, Flavorwire has picked the 50 scariest short stories of all time. Two LA authors lead the list:

1

“I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream,” Harlan Ellison

Ellison’s 1967 cult classic is a post-apocalyptic, sci-fi version of hell, in which the last four survivors on the planet are tortured by a vindictive and all-powerful computer. Get ready for the future, humans.

2

“The Veldt,” Ray Bradbury

Bradbury has a number of scary stories to choose from, including the famous and existentially terrifying “There Will Come Soft Rains,” but I always come back to “The Veldt.” What’s more terrifying, the lions, the house or the children?

At number 12 is “Flowers for Algernon,” Daniel Keyes – one of the few selections I was familiar with that seemed out of place. I’d say that story is heart-wrenching more than it is scary.

Edgar Allan Poe doesn’t appear on the list until lucky number 13 — “The Tell Tale Heart.”

Poe is the stranger-king of gothic horror, and this is him at his best, with a murderous narrator being driven slowly mad by the beating of his victim’s heart under the floorboards

Whether fiction is scary is a highly subjective thing, however, I recommend Richard Wadholm’s novel Astronomy, a Lovecraftian homage. I read it a few years ago and it truly creeped me out. If that’s the experience you’re seeking this Halloween, get a copy and give it a try.

Toss Those Awards in the Trash?

Via SF Signal, I read a portion of Adam Roberts’ denunciation of awards:

But awards lists and best-ofs are rubbish […] The problem is timescale.

It is a convention, no less foolish for being deeply rooted, that the proper prominence from which to pause, look back and make value judgments, is at the end of the year in question. This is wrongheaded in a number of reasons. One has to do with the brittleness of snap-judgments (why else do you think they’re called snap?). Take those fans and [awards-panelists] of the 1960s and 1970s who really really thought that the crucial figures of the genre were the often-garlanded Spider Robinson or Mack Reynolds rather than the rarely noticed Philip K Dick. They weren’t corrupt; they just spoke too soon.

It wasn’t Roberts’ rejection of awards that set me off: they’re not everyone’s cup of tea. What hooked me into responding was his superior sneer at a false version of awards history.

Superior sneer: Should the Hugo and Nebula be condemned for failing to ratify Philip K. Dick’s current popularity 40 years in advance? These awards don’t exist to predict the literature that people two generations in the future will value, they celebrate what the current-day community of fans and/or pros value and admire.

False version of awards history: “…the often garlanded…Mack Reynolds”? He wrote hundreds of stories, received exactly one Hugo nomination and two Nebula nominations, and never won either award. And it seems rather sad to pick on Spider Robinson, since according to Dick’s bibliography, Dick had zero short fiction published in the three eligibility years for which Spider received nominations, so how did Spider’s name even enter this conversation? Of course, it’s easier to win an argument if you’re allowed to make up your own facts.

I also challenge Roberts’ belief that fans of the ’60s and ’70s overlooked Philip K. Dick.

Had they done so, it might have been because he did not worship at the altar of technological optimism. In fact, they didn’t overlook or ignore him, he was often up for awards. If he didn’t write Analog stories that was no detriment at all to his fame, merely his pocketbook. In the ’60s, psychological exploration and social satire abounded in sf, no physics degree required. Yes, Dick was pessimistic. Paranoid. It was impossible for Dick to think of something bad enough that the authorities would hesitate to do it, seductively using technology to make us betray ourselves. Yet anybody who thinks these things disqualified a writer from recognition in the ’60s has never seen the stacks of awards in Harlan Ellison’s office.

Now, as a fan who lived through the era in question, I can testify that I really enjoyed Dick’s stories. Time Out of Joint was the first of his novels I read: it was captivating. And when I was in college the SF Book Club brought out editions of his new novels, so I read them all as time went by. Somehow I managed to enjoy his stories without suspecting that he was a dominant voice in the literary dialog of the day. His latter-day reputation as a great sf writer has taken me by surprise, though as far as that goes, good for him! We can only wish he’d lived to enjoy it.

When I’m flying out of Denver there’s an airport bookstore I pass which has the names of top writers decorating the wall around the border of the ceiling. Philip K. Dick is up there. I pass it right before I enter the TSA security line. What could be more Dickian than the future I live in? No wonder he’s widely read.

Returning to Adam Roberts’ critique, he may have no idea who won the awards, but he is certainly right that Dick won very few of them during his lifetime. Was this actually an injustice? I’ll lay out the record, and you tell me if you disagree with my take on the question.

Dick won the first Hugo he was ever nominated for, The Man in the High Castle (1963). So I guess justice was done that year.

His novelette “Faith of Our Fathers” made the final ballot in 1968 and lost to Fritz Leiber’s “Gonna Roll the Bones,” which I have always tried to like, and which must in some sense be a helluva story because it also beat “Pretty Maggie Moneyeyes” by Harlan Ellison who was winning everything in those days (such as the two Hugos his work did win in 1968 for “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream” and Star Trek’s “City on the Edge of Forever.”) Dick’s story wove together some wonderfully paranoid ideas. It seems to have haunted Dick, who wrote in 1977: “I think, with this story, I managed to offend everybody, which seemed at the time to be a good idea, but which I’ve regretted since. Communism, drugs, sex, God – I put it all together, and it’s been my impression since that when the roof fell in on me years later, this story was in some eerie way involved.”

His third and last Hugo nomination was for the 1975 novel Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said. It finished behind Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed. I found the Dick novel a more entertaining read, but (confession time) I felt the same way about Anderson’s Fire Time and Niven and Pournelle’s A Mote in God’s Eye. On the other hand, there seemed a general agreement among the rest of fandom that Le Guin’s novel was the most substantial and ambitious, the most deserving of the award. The same Dick and Le Guin novels faced off for the Nebula, with the same result. Does anyone today think Flow My Tears surpasses The Dispossessed? Let’s hear from you.

Philip K. Dick’s problem with the Nebula, the first time he was nominated, is that he had to compete against a great classic of the genre. The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch and Dr. Bloodmoney both received Nebula nominations in 1966. They lost to Frank Herbert’s Dune. I hope nobody’s complaining about that.

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? made the 1969 Nebula ballot (though not the Hugo final ballot) and lost to Alexei Panshin’s Rite of Passage. Consulting the fanzine I was publishing at the time, I see that Richard Wadholm and I never ran out of critical things to say about the Panshin book. On the other hand, I regarded John Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar as the novel of the year, not Dick’s story, and Brunner won the Hugo (with no help from me, I didn’t have a vote in 1969). If there was a great schism in the awards scene that year, it had nothing to do with Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

I’d say that the ultimate reason Philip K. Dick won few major awards is not because the voters were blind or ignorant, it’s because he wasn’t the only person writing excellent stories in those years.

My First Fanzine

I was a young teenager on the way to summer day camp, sometime in the late Sixties, riding in the back seat of the camp leader’s Ford station wagon. Among the junk on the floor of the car was a copy of Galaxy magazine, a name I recognized from H. L. Gold’s various Galaxy Reader short story collections, though Analog was the only pulp magazine I followed in those days. I picked this one up and paged through it until an ad caught my eye. Something named Science Fiction Review announced that it published articles by and interviews with a whole list of SF writers – including my personal favorite, Poul Anderson. What a revelation! It never occurred to me that these people talked to anybody but John W. Campbell, much less held their conversations in a nonfiction magazine that I could read.

I didn’t have the money to subscribe to SFR, or else I might have discovered fandom right away. Instead, the concept of such a magazine remained like a banked fire in my memory.

Around the same time, the Young Adult librarian at the local branch of the LA Public Library announced she was starting a science fiction discussion group. An eclectic handful of us came to the meetings, ranging from Richard Wadholm, the only one of us truly in tune with the Sixties, in his appreciation of rock music and Alexei Panshin, to Kent Halliwell, a conservative who read every issue of The Plain Truth and seemed disturbingly unsurprised the afternoon the librarian mentioned that the library’s most-stolen book was Mein Kampf.

After we’d been meeting for a couple of months, the librarian said the LAPL was willing to put some modest resources behind things the group wanted to do. I told them about my idea for a magazine, and the idea caught fire. As I mentioned, though I’d seen an ad for SFR we’d never seen a fanzine, or heard that word, so we tried to produce an imitation Analog. I wrote Campbellesque, pro-space editorials. Bryan Coles and Kent Halliwell produced political satires about the Galactic Congress. Richard Wadholm wrote short fiction and reviews. Mark Tinkle wrote poetry.

My parents contributed to a critical part of the plan when they agreed to make a Sears ink drum mimeograph a kind of family Christmas present.

The LAPL xeroxed the cover art, and I cranked out the rest of the pages on mimeograph.

That SFR ad had also fostered my ambition to get contributions from real pro writers. It implied they had all kinds of ideas and opinions they wanted to put in front of the public – which was true enough – so I naively offered them space for this purpose in our publication. I checked the LA phone books and located addresses for Harlan Ellison and Ray Bradbury. They actually answered, with brief, encouraging notes turning down my offer. They weren’t intended as contributions, obviously, yet it seemed a pity to waste them. So I began printing these in the “Rejection Slip” department, where the tables were turned and writers rejected a magazine.

Harlan promptly responded with another – surprisingly patient – note which essentially said, don’t do that again. So I didn’t.

And that is how our group started as a self-invented pocket of science fiction fandom.

It was not very long before our library-based fanac brought us in contact with mainstream fandom. We heard about LASFS from some Granada Hills High School students. Then, I finally did subscribe to Science Fiction Review and not only got to see that fanzine, but contacted one of its readers, Florence Jenkins, a local woman who had offered to give away her fanzines to someone who would come and pick them up. I came away with a carload of Granfalloons, Beabohemas, Yandros and other genzines of the day. I began to learn a lot about fannish culture. Before long, I was ready for new challenges – like LASFS poker.

Samuel Delany’s Nova

The Nashville SF Club Newsletter for October draws members’ attention to Paul Di Filippo’s review of Samuel R. Delany’s novel, Nova (1968), and recalls in what high esteem the late A. J. Budrys held the author: “Samuel R. Delany, right now, as of this book, Nova, not as of some future book or some accumulated body of work, is the best science-fiction writer in the world, at a time when competition for that status is intense. I don’t see how a writer can do more than wring your heart while explaining how it works. No writer can.”

Richard Wadholm and I, two members of a local club when the book came out in 1968, could not have agreed more after our own encounters with Delany’s genius. Nova’s influence resonates down all the years in Wadholm’s own story, “Green Tea“.

[Via Nashville SF Club Newsletter and Andrew Porter.]