The Crotchety Old Fan has written an outstanding post about A. Bertram Chandler’s biggest fan, Ross Pavlac, and how he left behind a clue that helped researchers find the manuscript for one of ABC’s unpublished stories.
Monthly Archives: September 2009
Electric Velocipede Now a Semiprozine
John Klima, on the heels of winning the 2009 Best Fanzine Hugo, has declared Electric Velocipede to be a semiprozine.
The Hugo rules, which require publications meeting certain criteria to compete in the Best Semiprozine category, also allow an editor to voluntarily classify his or her fanzine as a semiprozine, rendering it ineligible for Best Fanzine.
Google of Books Going on Sale
Google Inc. announced September 17 that it will be offering for sale paper copies of 2 million books no longer protected by copyright, published by high-speed, print-on-demand Espresso Book Machines at campus bookstores, libraries and small retailers.
A cartoonist once called this “Letting the cat out of the cellophane bag.” It’s the beginning of what critics of the Google settlement have been expecting to happen. And:
Millions more titles could be added to On Demand’s virtual inventory if Google gets federal court approval of a class-action settlement that would grant it the right to sell copyrighted books no longer being published. Google estimates it already has made digital copies of about 6 million out-of-print books.
[Thanks to John King Tarpinian for the story.]
Dirda Reviews Ballard Collection
in Washington Post
Ballard once said, “The only truly alien planet is Earth,” recalls Michael Dirda in his review of The Complete Stories of J.G. Ballard for the Washington Post.
Dirda sees parallels between Ballard and Philip K. Dick: many would agree. What’s surprising is his description of the contrasts in their work:
…Dick’s work is fundamentally sociable, a paean to unacknowledged goodness and the quiet satisfactions of ordinary life. Ballard’s protagonists tend to be isolated visionaries who inexorably pursue their obsessions to the point of madness or death, typically reaching self-fulfillment through nothing less than self-immolation.
By Michael Dirda’s lights, Phil Dick’s worldview sounds practically Hobbit-esque. But I don’t see Ragle Gumm or Frank Frink adjourning to the Prancing Pony for a jolly tankard of ale.
[Thanks to Andrew Porter for the link.]
Hand-to-Hand Selling
Francis Hamit, in “Street Level Views of Book Marketing” at SelfPublishingReview.com, uses stories from his latest Shenandoah Spy book tour to teach that if you want to get paid to write, then you have to get out there and sell:
I engage most of [the customers at my book signings] with a friendly greeting and a pitch line. This is something I learned in 1988, the year I was a Factory Representative for the Hoover Company, working in department stores. Most people did not come in to buy a vacuum cleaner, and most are not at a signing specifically to buy your book, no matter how much advance publicity you have done. Most have never heard of you or your book. You have to introduce yourself, and even if you don’t close right then, have a bookmark or other sales tool to hand them. It’s not the books you sell that day but the number you sell afterward that really counts and keeps your book on the shelves.
Roddenberry’s Mac Goes to Auction
First Apple Macintosh Plus, given to Gene Roddenberry
Profiles in History, which auctioned Forry Ackerman’s stuff earlier this year, will soon be taking bids on another item with fan appeal — a computer (serial number F4200NUM0001), given by Apple Computer, Inc. to Gene Roddenberry. It comes with a letter of authentication from Roddenberry’s son.
Some of you remember, I’m sure, that when the Macintosh Plus came on the market in 1986 it boasted an awesome 1 megabyte of RAM (upgradeable to 4Mb), supported the double-sided floppy disk format, and was the first Mac with a SCSI port for fast data transfer to and from an external hard drive.
The reason you remember is that you are still paying off the credit card you smoked to buy your own Mac Plus.
The full text of the press release follows the jump.
Update 09/18/2009: The publicist for Profiles in History forwarded a corrected press release after it was pointed out that the computer couldn’t have been the first Mac Plus. The replacement text now appears after the jump. He explains: “Firstly, this Macintosh was, indeed, presented to Gene Roddenberry by Apple. There is no doubt about this. The conflict between the photo and the serial number is as follows. This computer, given by Apple to Mr. Roddenberry, is an early production Macintosh 128 (#776), which was then upgraded by Apple for Gene to a Macintosh Plus-thus the model number / serial number / panel that “belongs to” a Macintosh Plus. The 0001 led us to mistakenly believe that it was the first one off the line.”
Don’t Put That Bear
Where There’s No Air
Space walking bears
British teddy bears strapped to a helium weather balloon reached the edge of space, an altitude of 100,000 feet, daring the nearly airless night in tiny spacesuits made by school children.
After rising to an altitude of around 100,000ft, a webcam caught their ‘space-walk’ for posterity before the helium balloon burst.
They then fell to Earth before a parachute opened automatically to provide a soft landing.
During the 2 hour 9 minute flight the radio on board broadcast the location of the craft to a chase team on the ground…
They landed just 50 miles from their launch pad by Churchill College in Cambridge.
My 7-year-old Sierra is quite interested in science, but if she was involved in this project I know she’d worry about the teddies. This crew met a happy ending, but that isn’t always the case:
During ten previous experiments, half have ended up ditching in the North Sea. One disappeared over Scandinavia before washing up on the coast of Denmark.
Sierra definitely would not like that.
[Thanks to David Klaus for the story.]
Steve Vertlieb on Twilight Zone
Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone aired for the first time on October 2, 1959. Steve Vertlieb, the Thunder Child, celebrates the show’s 50th anniversary in his essay “An Element of Time”, by telling the fascinating story of how the show succeeded despite the mundane tastes of CBS executives, and became an icon of early television:
There is an obscure Air Force term relating to a moment when a plane is coming down on approach and a pilot cannot see the horizon. It’s called the Twilight Zone. …
Rod Serling had penned several landmark teleplays for The Columbia Broadcasting System, including Patterns, and Requiem For A Heavyweight, but the perils of network censorship were beginning to take a toll on the idealistic author. As his artistic voice and moral integrity became increasingly challenged by network cowardice, Serling found his search for lost horizons alarmingly elusive.
(Vertlieb would like it noted that his essay has been posted simultaneously at Roger Hall’s Film Music Review.)
[Thanks to Steve Vertlieb and John King Tarpinian for the links.]
Gagging on Google
It wasn’t so long ago that people’s only thought after seeing the Google name was “There’s a company with a fabulous search engine.” Period.
A little later, people envied the fun Google employees had thinking up more cool ways to organize and distribute information. Like digitizing all the books in the world. Or photographing all the streets in the world.
But once Google actually did these projects, fun wasn’t the first word to come to people’s minds.
Instead, it was “Lawsuit,” or the latest controversy over the Google Book Search Settlement.
And “Spies.” In a small English town a photographer for Google Street View was suspected of having exactly the same kind of “fun” enjoyed by agents of the KGB, according to a story in the Los Angeles Times:
The good folk of Broughton don’t take kindly to being photographed without permission. Just ask Google.
When the search-engine giant sent one of its specially equipped cars to take pictures of the village for its Street View feature, residents swung into action. They stopped the car in its tracks, called the police and quizzed the bewildered driver for nearly two hours before letting him go.
Many Swiss have complained too. No wonder:
In one image, a married Swiss politician was photographed with a blond who was not his wife, which forced him to explain publicly that the woman was his secretary. In another case, a Street View image was reprinted in a newspaper, and “as a result, a restaurant owner had to explain how he was photographed in a known drug-dealing area,” said [Hanspeter Thuer, the Swiss federal data-protection commissioner].
The way Google has handled this inevitably makes it sound quite sinister. Yet if Google handled things a bit differently I bet the tide would turn in its favor.
What if, instead of surreptitiously driving through towns taking photographs, Google Street View advertised its route in advance? People endure all kinds of abuse on reality shows so they can say “Hey Ma, I’m on TV!” Allow people to snatch a little piece of fame with no more inconvenience than standing in their front yard at a certain time and the number who’ll be pleased by the arrangement will swamp the few who object — particularly because anyone who is someplace he shouldn’t be will be warned to duck out of sight when the camera rolls by.
Vonda McIntyre’s Superluminal at BookViewCafe
Hugo and Nebula-award winning author Vonda N. McIntyre has released her novel Superluminal as an ebook at BookViewCafe.com. Read it free as a serial, one chapter per week, or buy the complete novel as a downloadable ebook for $4.99.
Superluminal was originally published in 1983 by Houghton Mifflin.
Other titles from McIntyre available at BookViewCafe.com include the award-winning Dreamsnake and The Moon and the Sun, as well as a number of her short stories.