Five Things You Think I Should Know

Michael Moorcock in 1957.

(1) Michael J. Walsh sent me a link to Rob Hansen’s remarkable online scrapbook of reports and photos from the London Worldcon of 1957. The convention comes vibrantly back to life in the words of Walt Willis, James White, Sam Moskowitz, Brian Aldiss, Chuck Harris and Rory Faulkner. There are photos galore – including the first I have ever seen of Michael Moorcock without a beard (but I guess that’s inevitable if only you can go back in time far enough — and isn’t that what science fiction is for?)

(2) David Klaus enjoyed reading “one of the great stories of the year” — about the time Mary Poppins star Dick Van Dyke feared death after falling asleep on his surfboard, til friendly porpoises pushed him to shore.  Says David, “Similar accounts go back to ancient times. We have to re-think our definition of ‘sentient’, as mere ‘animals’ don’t do this.”

(3) Gary Farber drew my attention to his interesting post about Scott Edelman’s video of a WFC 2010 panel, “The Moral Distance Between the Author and the Work.” Click on the link for Gary’s analysis and to learn about the video’s “dramatic conclusion leaving Nancy Kress describing herself as speechless, she was so indignant at the fact that Eric Flint had cut a few bits of James Schmitz when republishing his work…”

(4) And back to David Klaus, with a news report of China’s plan to send an orbiter to Mars in 2013 and the eerie science fictional coincidence about its name: “Remember how on Firefly the Alliance was made of a combination descended from a union of the United States and the People’s Republic of China? They’re going to call [the orbiter] ‘Firefly’.”

(5) Finally, a link from James Hay’s ConDor list: “Apparently the Town of Oamaru in New Zealand, which has long celebrated its Victorian heritage has gone entirely steampunk.”

5 thoughts on “Five Things You Think I Should Know

  1. This is my typo (I know because I do it a lot) “union the the United” when it should say “union of the United” that you copied-and-pasted.

    Also, the single-quotation mark after “animals” in the porpoise story got left out. Again, that may be my fault.

    Thanks for fixing my bad copy-editing of my own text. I should do better than that.

    I think there was a mention in one of Larry Niven’s ARM stories about after their sentience being recognized by the United Nations, the cetaceans tying up world courts for reparations for whales killed by humans, although the narrator suspected they were doing it for fun, just to watch the humans squirm.

  2. “Click on the link for Gary’s analysis”

    Flattering, but “passing remarks” would be more accurate, and I will also warn people that those comments are interspersed with other links and comments in the same post, as I was experimenting with writing in a slightly different format, which made for a perhaps excessive lack of linearity.

    What people really shouldn’t miss in that post is the video of the iPhone launched into space by the Brooklyn Space Program, made by the iPhone.

    I am not making this up.

    A bunch of other links in there, some sf, some fannish, some politics (be warned), for what it’s worth, at least a couple of which some might find amusing. Or not.

    For what it’s worth, which is mostly to drive Moshe Feder crazy, I linked to and commented about your China Moon link on October 24th here, in another post with many other links and comments.

    I pretty much filled all of October with chock-a-block link dumps, knowing I’d be moving in November, and blogging little until, well, at least another week or two or three from now.

    Thanks muchly for the link!

  3. Well, that didn’t work. Oh, well. Really hope you’ll install Preview someday, so we can see what our HTML looks like before you fail it or not, if you ever feel like that’s worth doing. If you like, although I’ve never used Word Press, I’ll be happy to look up the plug-in for you.

    Oh, heck, let’s see, from scratch. Plug-ins here: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/

    Here are a bunch of Comment Preview related plug-ins: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/search.php?q=preview+comments&sort=

    Here’s one: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/ajax-comment-preview/

    If that doesn’t work, and you ever have time and interest, I’d be happy to spare a few moments to help you in any way I can with installing a preview option. Obviously, if you aren’t interested, you shouldn’t bother.

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