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(1) An Al Hirschfeld signed lithograph of the Star Trek: The Next Generation crew is for sale by the Baltimore Science Fiction Society.

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This a signed limited edition (127 of 375) print originally owned by science fiction fan legend Marty Gear. The lithograph shows the cast of the Star Trek the Next Generation TV Series and was commissioned by cast member Brent Spiner (Commander Data) with many given to the cast and crew of the show during the show’s original run as gifts…. This hand signed numbered print was dry mounted and framed by Marty Gear in a silver frame with glass and was bequeathed to BSFS in Marty’s will. It is in perfect condition. We are offering this item for $1,495.00 plus tax and shipping.

(2) “(Almost) Every SFF Adaptation Coming to Television and Movie Theaters!” compiled by Natalie Zutter at Tor.com.

Thanks to Game of Thrones and Marvel’s Cinematic Universe, we’ve entered a golden age of sci-fi and fantasy properties being developed for film and television. It seems that nearly every network and studio has snatched up the rights to old and new classics, with a bevy of projects in production or premiering in the coming months. We’ve compiled a master list of every SFF adaptation currently in the works, from American Gods to Y: The Last Man. And surprising no one, prolific writers Neil Gaiman and John Scalzi each have a number of projects in varying stages of development.

(3) The fourth installment of Superversive Blog’s interview with Ruth Johnston, author of Re-modeling the Mind: Personality in Balance, is titled “Culture War Post 4: The War Over Archetypes!”

L. Jagi Lamplighter poses the questions in this series described as “Speculative Fiction meets Jung.”

Q: So the group that is interested in exploring gender roles and seeing them as less restrictive probably loves books like Ancillary Justice or Left Hand of Darkness, which do just that. In fact, it was probably a major factor in Ancillary Justice winning the Hugo in 2014.

A: If there’s one thing the two sides in the Hugo controversy agree on, it’s that the most important thing about Ancillary Justice is not the story itself but the way it used pronouns to obscure gender. Everyone is “she” until the narrator has a reason to identify male or female. It’s explained in the story as just part of the narrator’s native language which, like Chinese and Turkish, doesn’t specify gender in a normal sentence. The narrator, writing in English, is forced to make gender choices in every sentence, so instead just uses “she” for everyone. But I had to read some of the story to understand the thing about language, because when people talk about Ancillary Justice, they elevate the single pronoun to such importance that it’s like the story was really just about obscuring gender. If they liked the story, it’s because at last we’re disrupting mental assumptions that gender will always be visible. If they didn’t like the story, it’s because obscuring gender became more important than whatever was happening.

So that’s a great example of the wider culture battle interfering in science fiction and crowning a winner in what might otherwise just be a dispute about literary taste. Once it’s connected to the wider question of how we, in real life, see men and women, then it’s about life and death, good and evil. It’s like they’re saying, “If you don’t like this story, maybe it’s because you want to suppress the “‘other’.” Those who didn’t like the story respond in defensiveness: “well maybe if you like the story, it’s because you care more about message! You just want to disrupt society.” Now it’s no longer about literary taste, it’s about hurting people or destroying the culture, and things “just got real,” as they say. There are pre-existing political sides to take, and these sides are ready to swing into action even if they don’t care about science fiction or fantasy.

(4) From a website devoted to Joyce Carol Oates — “Into the Void: Lovecraft and the World Fantasy Award”.

Joyce Carol Oates’s short story “Fossil-Figures” from the collection The Corn Maiden and Other Nightmares won a World Fantasy Award in 2011. Her story collection Haunted: Tales of the Grotesque was a finalist for the collection award in 1995. The award itself is a bust of H.P. Lovecraft.

At the link is a Twitter conversation about the news that the Lovecraft statue will no longer be used for the award.

(5) The publisher of Castalia House, Vox Day, would like everyone to know the firm is doing well.

Two _1

Two simultaneous #1 bestsellers isn’t bad, especially when you only publish one book each month.

It’s also worth noting that in the Military Strategy category, Castalia House currently publishes five of the top 40 bestsellers.

(6) Kate Paulk, never known for her economy of prose, could have distilled today’s Mad Genius Club post into this sentence:

And yet, when I pointed out that our dear anti-Puppy friends were behaving like the Nazis did, complete with examples and quotes, I was horrible, just absolutely horrible.

(7) But this is a strange field. John Scalzi wrote a post reassuring the original Sad Puppy, Larry Correia, that when it comes to book tour audiences, “Size Matters Not”.

I’ve been actively touring novels since 2007, when Tor put me on tour for The Last Colony. Since that time, across several tours, I’d say my largest tour event had several hundred people at it, and my smallest event had… three. Yes, three. I was at the time a New York Times best selling, award-winning author, and yet three people showed up to a tour event of mine. And they were lovely people! And we had a fine time of it, the three of them and I. But still: Three.

Because sometimes that happens. And it happens to every writer. Ask nearly any writer who has done an event, and they will tell you a tale of at least one of their events populated by crickets and nothing else. Yes, even the best sellers. And here’s the thing about that: Even with the best sellers, it’s an event often in the not-too-recent past. Every time you do an event, you roll the dice. Sometimes you win and get a lot of people showing up. Sometimes you lose and you spend an awkward hour talking to the embarrassed bookstore staff. Either way, you deal with it, and then it’s off to the next one.

Also, tangentially: the dude on Twitter trying to plink one off of Larry because of the size of his event crowd? Kind of a dick. …

And then those seven or eight or forty or however many people will go home feeling valued by Larry, and they’ll keep buying his books and keep recommending them to friends and others. Because that’s the point and that’s how it’s done. The value of doing a book event is not only about who is in the crowd that day. It’s the knock-on effect from there — building relationships with fans and booksellers, and benefiting when they talk you up to friends and customers and so on….

(8) It really must be National Pat Your Puppy Day, because George R.R. Martin claimed to have found a silver lining in the Hugo disaster:

Last time I talked about some possible nominees for Dramatic Presentation, Long Form. This time I want to focus on Dramatic Presentation, Short Form. In other words, best television episode. (No, not officially, but that’s what it usually comes down to, and let’s ignore the silliness of nominating an Easter Egg or an acceptance speech from the previous year’s Hugos).

I was no fan of the efforts of Puppies to game the Hugo Awards last year. I don’t think I have been shy in my opinions on that subject. But I will give the Puppies this much — their efforts did break the decade-long hold that Dr. Who fandom had on the nominations in this category. I have no problem with episodes of DR. WHO being nominated, and indeed winning, mind you… and the Doctor has won plenty of times in this category over the past decade… but when four of the six finalists are from the same category, that strikes me as way unbalanced and, well, greedy. The Doctor’s fans love their show, I know, but there is a LOT of great SF and fantasy on the tube right now. Nominate DR. WHO, by all means… but leave some room for someone else, please.

(9) Even S. T. Joshi got some love today — in Black Gate’s post “New Treasures: The Madness of Cthulhu, Volume Two, edited by S.T. Joshi”.

The reason his stock is still flying high is because Black Gate’s review of Volume 1 is quoted on the back cover…

G. Winston Hyatt wrote:

Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness serves as the inspiration for many of the authors in The Madness of Cthulhu… it’s masterful in concept and at times in execution. A fusion of Antarctic adventure, science fiction, and early-modern horror, it not only offers chilling passages with an escalating sense of dread and isolation, but also constructs a world horrifying in its implications about mankind…

The second volume contains 14 brand new stories inspired by Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness.

(10) As SF Site News explains, “In 2014, SFWA developed an accessibility checklist for its internal events, such as the Nebula Award Weekend or the New York Reception. SFWA has now elected to make the checklist public and available to other events which may desire to have some guidelines.”

“Accessibility Checklist for SFWA Spaces” is now posted at the SFWA Blog.

The SFWA Accessibility Checklist is provided for the use of conventions and other gatherings who want to ensure that their event is fully accessible by all attendees.

The checklist was assembled by Matthew Johnson, Teresa Frohock, Peggy Rae Sapienza, Tanya Washburn, and Bill Thomasson.

(11) RedWombat in a comment on File 770.

Let us go then, me and you,
When the awards are nearly due,
Like shoggoths dissected upon a table;
Let us go, through eldritch winding blogs,
Muttering and wordy slogs,
Of those upset in one-line tweets
And those who pound the well-worn beats:
“PC censorship!”–a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question….
Oh, do not ask, “What the hell is that?”
You behold the bust of Lovecraft.

In the room the fans go fore and aft,
Talking of H. Phillip Lovecraft.

(12) Glenn Fleishman visited Amazon’s new brick-and-mortar bookstore in Seattle to shoot some photos – and in the process caught a labeling error in the sf section where Neil Gaiman’s American Gods is listed as the 2015 Hugo Award winner. (It won in 2002.)

Amazon FleishmanAmerican Gods Fleishman

Finding Marty’s Gear

Dave Doering, Costume-Con 23 co-chair, comments on the passing of Marty Gear:

I am sure I echo the feelings of so many other fans that Marty was a class act. A gentleman in every way. Always with a kind word and simply fabulous behind the microphone as emcee. The gods of fandom smiled upon us when they gave us Marty Gear as voice for our creations onstage.

Doering also remembers coming away from the 1993 Worldcon with this resolve:

I simply loved him in ConFrancisco as emcee–which is why we had him do our SF masquerade at CostumeCon in Ogden.

When Doering’s chance finally came in 2005, it came with a bit of unplanned adventure:

Marty’s persona as Dracula–makeup, costume, etc. –shipped in a large crate–which somehow managed to disappear between Baltimore and Salt Lake. UPS said it was likely on this certain truck en route in the city. I had to chase down this UPS truck through the streets in pursuit of what I hoped was his Marty “gear”. (Just try finding a UPS driver on his route when they didn’t do cellphones!)

I ended up running into another UPS truck, and the two drivers said, “Try the parking lot over on 2nd West near Taco Bell”. Which I did. Fortunately, a UPS truck came gliding up. (I can’t imagine what the driver must have thought finding this anxious conchair tracking him down.)

It was then I discovered just how big that crate was–in fact, it was coffin-sized. And I often wondered if it wasn’t actually Marty in there as well–saving on airfare resting on his beloved turf from his homeland. (Though I didn’t open it but merely took it to the hotel for delivery.)

What a bite to lose him. Really going to miss that guy.

Marty Gear (1939 – 2013)

Marty Gear at 2009 Arisia. Photo by Daniel P. Noé.

Marty Gear at 2009 Arisia. Photo by Daniel P. Noé.

Legendary costuming fan Marty Gear, whose fanac spanned six decades, died in his sleep on July 18 at the age of 74.

Marty and his wife, Bobby (who predeceased him in 2005), won many awards in masquerade competitions. He founded The Greater Columbia Fantasy Costumers’ Guild, a forerunner of the International Costumers’ Guild, was the ICG’s first Executive Director, and was honored with the ICG’s Lifetime Achievement Award in 1991.

One of Marty’s earliest fannish experiences, when he was 14, was traveling from Columbus, Ohio to Philadelphia for the 1953 Worldcon. Marty was unprepared for what he found there, felt overwhelmed and said he would have gone back to his hotel room to hide but for “a tall, white-haired man [who] came over and began to talk to me about what I liked to read. I had just bought a copy of Skylark of Valeron in the dealers’ room… and began enthusing about this ‘new’ writer that I had just discovered, E.E. Smith, Ph.D.” He soon discovered it was Smith himself he was telling this to, and Doc and his wife took Marty in tow, introducing him to other authors and artists. “For the remainder of the weekend, whenever either of them saw me alone they made a point of checking to see if I was enjoying myself, and of somehow including me in whatever was going on.”

Despite this friendly encounter with one of the field’s most loved writers, Marty did not attend another SF con until 1977 when Page Cuddy and David Hartwell “conned” him into going to a Balticon in order to meet Philip Jose Farmer.

After that Marty rapidly developed into a fannish leader. He ran programming for Balticon 13 in 1979 and became a regular fixture as the con’s masquerade director beginning in 1981. He chaired CostumeCon 3 (1985) and Balticon 21 (1987).

He held major committee posts on 4 Worldcons. Michael J. Walsh, chair of the 1983 Baltimore Worldcon where Marty ran the masquerade, likes to tell the story – “In 1981 when I called him from Denvention to let him know we had won: ‘Marty, bad news!’ [He answered] ‘We won?’”

Marty was famous for presiding over masquerades in costume as Count Dracula. And he was infamous for filling time with terrible vampire jokes such as —

What do you get when you cross a snowman with a vampire?

Frostbite!

One of his most challenging moments came while directing the 1998 Worldcon (Bucconeer) masquerade — at the start he stumbled against a table of awards and took a four-foot fall off the stage. Quite the trouper, Marty got right back up and did his job without visible problems. He even looked in pretty good shape the morning after at the masquerade critique where he had nothing to say about his mishap except an apology for detracting from the costumers. He did use a cane for awhile afterwards, though.

Marty was a fiery advocate for his beloved event. Even at a Worldcon he refused to concede first place to the Hugo Ceremony, protesting during the Bucconeer masquerade post-mortem, “To the Worldcon committee the Masquerade is not the most important event…. It’s just the best-attended, and has the most people involved, but to the committee it’s a secondary event.”

When he was feeling more mellow he’d deliver the message humorously, saying things like, “Costuming is the second oldest tradition in sci-fi fandom. The first is drinking beer.”

Marty remained an active member of the Baltimore Science Fiction Society, and at the time of his death was parliamentarian of the BSFS Board of Directors, coordinator of the Jack L. Chalker Young Writers’ Contest, and liaison to the school for the BSFS Books for Kids program.

Over the years he was a guest of honor at Unicon 87, Disclave 34, Sci-Con 8, Genericon 2, Arisia 9, and Balticon 30.

Professionally, Marty managed his own company Martin Gear Consulting Ltd.

Other than dressing as a vampire, Marty said one of his favorite costumes was “Cohen the Barbarian” a prize-winner at the 2004 Worldcon as “Best DiscWorld Entry.” His Cohen wore a fur diaper, a very long white beard and an eyepatch — and not much else. In one hand he carried a sword and in the other a walking cane.

To the end Marty continually mentored costumers and passed on his enthusiasm for the costuming arts. He told an interviewer, “I probably won’t stop costuming until I am dead, and maybe not even then.”

***

See Marty in his Dracula garb start the 2008 Balticon masquerade with a horrible joke.

In this interview at Anime USA 2012 Marty explained how he judges anime and reproduction costumes in terms that would be at home on Project Runway — “Clothes have to fit.”

Getting into Gear at Halloween

Halloween’s approaching, it’s time for the Associated Press to gin up some articles about dressing in costumes. But their coverage of science fiction costuming has an unpredictable twist.

The surprise is not in the article’s choice to discuss a narrow range of examples, or that the first one it picks is the 501st Legion, who parade as Imperial Storm Troopers. What’s unexpected is that the rest of the article is devoted to competition at World Science Fiction Convention masquerades.

The beginning is generic:

Here is how most people make a Darth Vader costume: Go to Wal-Mart, purchase flimsy mask and cape, spend Halloween night breathing funny.

For Mark Fordham, the process is a little more in-depth. Over the course of more than 20 years, this 44-year-old from Provo, Utah, has been slowly piecing together and improving his Vader ensemble, beginning with a simple jumpsuit/vampire cape combo. Today, the outfit weighs more than 40 pounds, and features a real electronic panel with blinking lights and voice mike, a vacuum-molded helmet, and a cape Fordham made himself from $30-a-yard wool crepe.

But later on the reporter interviews Marty Gear, a veteran fan who has presided over several Worldcon masquerades. Gear provides historical perspective and comic relief all at once:

“Costuming is the second oldest tradition in sci-fi fandom,” Gear says. “The first is drinking beer.”

[Via Isaac Alexander and Michael J. Walsh]