Monthly Archives: November 2010

Wooster: Margaret Vartanoff Dies

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By Martin Morse Wooster: Margaret Ellen Vartanoff, mother of fans Irene and Ellen Vartanoff, grandmother of Trevor Vartanoff, and mother-in-law of Scott Edelman, died on November 13, one day before her 96th birthday.  Her Rockville, Maryland home hosted many meetings of the Potomac River Science Fiction Society and the Washington branches of the Mythopoeic Society and Burroughs Bibliophiles over the past 20 years.

Margaret Brown was born in Chicago in 1914. As a teenager, her daughter Irene recalled, she was so smart that she took class notes in French to keep from being bored.  She kept on learning for most of her life. “Before the Internet, there was my mother,” her daughter Irene recalled. “She was my own family’s Wikipedia.”

After she was graduated from the University of Chicago, Margaret Brown went to Washington, where she worked for the Army Map Service. Her supervisor was Michael “Misha” Vartanoff. They fell in love and married.Misha and Margaret Vartanoff had three children. They also co-wrote two books, What is It In Space Age Russian? (1963) and What Is It In Elementary Russian? (1965).

Although not a fan, Margaret Vartanoff encouraged her daughters to read, and allowed her teenage daughters Ellen and Irene to attend sf and comics conventions from the 1960s onward.  Margaret Vartanoff accompanied her daughter Ellen to the 1987 Worldcon, but spent her time sightseeing while Ellen went to the convention.’

A funeral service was held on November 20 at St. Mary Magdalene Episcopal Church in Silver Spring. About 20 fans were in the audience, and another half-dozen were in the choir.

Meanwhile, Back in Reality

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Here’s a wonderful coincidence: Norton Juster, author of The Phantom Tollbooth, is also the architect whose firm designed the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art.

I learned this from the profile of Juster in Publishers Weekly which also told an anecdote about Juster’s hitch in the Navy. His whimsical drawings of elves and other fantastical creatures drew unwelcome attention from a commanding officer who told him that Navy men don’t draw elves.

Given the opportunity, I bet that officer also would have told him gremlins do not exist!

[Thanks to Andrew Porter for the link.]

Tarpinian: Glendale Bookstore
Celebrates Forry’s 94th

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By John King Tarpinian: Today was Forrest J (no dot) Ackerman’s 94th birthday party at Mystery & Imagination Bookshop in Glendale, CA. Forry would have been 94 on the 24th.  The party was hosted by George Clayton Johnson (the man gets around for an 81-year-old!) George talked for about half an hour about Forry and his influences on people and his being the first real fanboy. He talked about how Forry was a founding member of LASFS. How he took a young Ray Bradbury under his wing and loaned him the money to go East to meet publishers.

Among the people doing readings were actor James Karen. James is a longtime friend of 4E and is best known for his performances appearing in the Living Dead cult classics and soap operas. James read Forry’s obituary for Boris Karloff.

Angus Scrimm (The Tall Man in the Phantasm movies) was among those in the audience.

Michael Gough, stage and voice actor brought his Theremin and played “Happy Birthday.” Michael has performed at six of 4E’s birthday parties.

George Clayton Johnson

4e’s Cake

 

Angus Scrimm

Michael Gough

 

James Karen

William Self Dies

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William Self, a TV and film producer with many genre shows in his resume, died in Los Angeles on November 15, aged 89.

He exec-produced both the Batman and Green Hornet shows for ABC. His Wonder Woman series never got past the pilot stage and an aborted Batgirl spin-off saw the character reincorporated into its Gotham City parent show.

Self collaborated frequently with Irwin Allen, exec-producing Land of the Giants, Lost In Space and Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea.

His other shows included the TV version of The Ghost & Mrs Muir.

[Thanks to Steve Green for the story.]

Lost: My Mind

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Kaja and Phil Foglio

Phil Foglio is a Loscon 37 Guest of Honor. Now famed for his Girl Genius online comic, he came to early prominence as the artist who partnered with Robert Asprin in 1976 to create “The Capture”, a very funny graphic story presented at cons in slide show form that became the first faannish production ever nominated for the Best Dramatic Presentation Hugo.  

Even though it’s Phil’s pro work that Loscon is focusing on, this was the reason I remembered “The Capture” today. Or tried to.

I don’t know if I’ve seen it again since 1976 when I sat in a darkened ballroom at MidAmeriCon while the images flashed by and Robert Asprin narrated. Or so I almost remember.

And that afternoon the hilarity and excitement built as the audience repeatedly and ever more loudly filled in the comic line that drives the story, which is….  Which is…

I thought I was losing my mind. How could I remember sitting in that ballroom and not remember the joke?

I thought — Man, I’m embarrassing myself here. What if fans found out this happened to me?

Just thank goodness that we have the internet. I knew Google would save me because it can always find the answer even when my question is wrong.

Except not today.

You know the joke about trying to look something up in the dictionary that you don’t know how to spell? It’s like that. If you misremember the catchphrase as being “no such thing as ____” there isn’t a search engine in the world that can help you.

Originally I expected Google or Bing to return the answer if I merely searched Foglio and “The Capture”, but that was too general for them to work with. That search returned a lot of websites that know a coloring book was made from the show art, or that Robert Asprin shared credit, but provide very little detail about “The Capture” itself, not even the iconic tagline. Nor is there a Wikipedia article about “The Capture”, only a reference to it on a disambiguation page, and another in the article about Foglio himself, “The Capture” formatted as one of those pathetic red-colored links Wikipedia uses when it wishes somebody would write an article about the thing, except nobody does because they’re annoyed that the last entry they did had 17 warning labels slapped on it by the Wiki guardians for bad formatting, lack of citations and halitosis.     

So I recommend that if you ever find yourself in a situation where Google and Bing have failed – and with the onset of increasing age who won’t? – you should do what I did.

Ask Craig Miller.

He’ll know.

Once Craig reminded me about gremlins I could get any search engine to fill in the rest, just like a bank that’s always ready to lend money to people who don’t need it. “Gremlins do not exist!” is everywhere on the internet. Armed with the correct catchphrase it is no trouble at all to find thousands of references, including the concise description I will use as a closing quote, written by Jerry Pournelle as part of a reminiscence about the late Kelly Freas:  

Kelly was the “star” of a famous science fiction skit called “The Capture”, based on the premise that a World Science Fiction Convention was held on a cruise ship in the Bermuda Triangle, and the inevitable happened: all the passengers were taken aboard an alien spaceship. The skit was done as a series of reports by the alien expedition commander. Most of the reports received advice from headquarters that “Gremlins do not exist,” although it was clear from what was going on with the detainees that perhaps there was a gremlin among them. It would be no favor to Robert Asprin and Phil Foglio who created this remarkable presentation to try to summarize it, and I don’t suppose it was recorded, which is all our loss.

Loscon 2010 Science Programming

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Loscon 37 is fortunate to have an incredible community of space exploration professionals and enthusiasts on the program. This year’s speakers include some connected with Boeing, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), OASIS, the Los Angeles chapter of the National Space Society, and XCOR Aerospace.

There will be presentations about unmanned missions already on the way to investigate the Moon, asteroids and the planet Saturn. Panelists actually working on private and government space initiatives will discuss the strengths and weaknesses of each approach. And there will be lighter panels about science related to the entertainment industry.  

Bob Gounley, a project systems engineer at Jet Propulsion Laboratory, recipient of NASA’s Exceptional Service and Exceptional Achievement Awards, and past president of OASIS, will update fans on the Dawn and GRAIL missions.

Dawn Mission – Encounter with Vesta
Friday – 1:30 p.m.

Exploring a new frontier, the Dawn mission will journey back in time over 4.5 billion years to the beginning of our Solar System. How is this “time travel” possible? Many thousands of small bodies orbit the Sun in the asteroid belt—a large region between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. They formed at the same time and in similar environments as the bodies that grew to be the rocky planets (Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars). Scientists theorize that the asteroids were budding planets and never given the opportunity to grow, due to gravitational stirring by massive Jupiter.

NASA’s Dawn spacecraft is fast approaching its rendezvous with Asteroid Vesta in July 2011.  Over the next year, controllers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory will use Dawn to make the first detailed survey of a Main-Belt asteroid before sending it to Asteroid Ceres.  There, in February 2015, Dawn will become the first interplanetary mission to orbit two different bodies. Come see hear about Dawn’s journey and preview its explorations ahead.

GRAIL Explores the Moon – A Mission of Gravity
Saturday 11:30 a.m.

Launching September 2011, NASA’s twin GRAIL spacecraft will make a detailed map of the Moon’s gravity.  Orbiting above the lunar surface, the relative motion of the two satellites will reveal aspect of lunar geology, for example remnants of ancient asteroids, from crust to core.   These imprints of the Moon’s formation could tell us much about the early history of the solar system.  Come hear the latest news about this mission from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Bridget Landry returns with more news of the Cassini Mission to Saturn. Educated as a chemist and planetary scientist and trained as an engineer, Bridget has worked on the Hubble Space Telescope, the joint US-French oceanographic Earth orbiter Topex, the (wildly successful!) Mars Pathfinder project, on the Cassini Mission to Saturn and is currently a team member of the Dawn mission to the asteroids Vesta and Ceres.  She is also deeply interested in, and committed to helping with the retention of girls in science and math, from middle school onwards.  In her technical hat, she has been on science panels at WorldCons, local, and regional conventions.

Cassini’s Extended Mission
Sunday 11:30 a.m.

Come see the amazing new pictures from the two-year extension of the Cassini Mission to Saturn.  The Saturnian Equinox occurred last year, turning the ring system edge-on to the sun and resulting in some awesome images and adding to Cassini’s impressive store of data.

Seth Potter and Dean Davis will tell about the benefits to space exploration that might be made possible by orbital power beaming technology.

Seth Potter is an Associate Technical Fellow at The Boeing Company in El Segundo, California, where he has worked on space exploration missions, space solar power, on-orbit satellite servicing, and navigation and communications satellites. He is a member of the Board of Advisors of the National Space Society, the Board of Directors of the OASIS-Los Angeles Chapter of NSS, and the Space Colonization Technical Committee of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics.

Dean Davis is a Senior Principal Scientist/Engineer Analysis Senior Study Leader for the Boeing Phantom Works. Over the last three decades, he has contributed to many scientific, commercial, military, and intelligence aircraft and spacecraft. Most of the projects on his resume are well known to fans, beginning with 52 Space Shuttle Missions and the International Space Station.

Orbital Power Beaming for Extraterrestrial Exploration
Friday 4:30

Collecting solar energy in space for use on Earth has been considered for many years, but has been held back for cost reasons. However, there may be nearer-term uses for this technology in exploring the Moon, Mars, and other bodies in space. By collecting energy in space and beaming to assets on the surface of a planet, the mass needed to be landed on the planet’s surface for power generation/collection may be decreased. Lunar exploration may benefit through the ability to receive power on a solar array during the two-week-long lunar night.  Mars polar exploration may benefit through the ability to receive power during the long Martian winter, when the sun is not visible. The availability of beamed power at laser wavelengths can facilitate base operations as well as propellant production from in situ resources.

Doug Jones designs and tests rockets for XCOR Aerospace. He has over a hundred skydives, and has flown aboard a rocket plane as flight test engineer half a dozen times. He knows that space diving is the obvious next step: 

Space Diving: from Dream to Reality
Saturday 10:00 a.m.

A former skydiver and current rocket designer shows how a space diver will leap from above the atmosphere to re-enter supersonically and land safely. The ultimate E ticket… 

Robert Cesarone of JPL, Aleta Jackson from XCOR Aerospace, science expert and Ph.D. in Theoretical Chemistry Genny Dazzo, spaceship designer and SF broadcast personality Warren James, and physicist Todd Brun of USC will tackle the issue of private vs. government-backed space exploration.

Getting to Space: Can Uncle Sam or Delos Harriman Do It Better?
Saturday 2:30 p.m.

One of the biggest decisions in the space community today is between having the government do it vs. letting private companies do it.  

Todd Brun is a quantum physicist and a professor at the University of Southern California, where he does research on quantum computers and writes the occasional paper on time machines.  

Robert Cesarone has been at JPL for 33 years, working in trajectory and maneuver design, telecommunications and Voyager navigation.  He is a recipient of the NASA Exceptional Service Medal. 

Genevieve Dazzo holds a Ph.D. in Theoretical Chemistry and is well versed in many different scientific disciplines.  She is currently a computer consultant working on a computer game to be used to train members of the US armed forces. 

Warren W. James, has been the host, and now also web master, of Mike Hodel’s Hour 25 since the early-90’s.  He also has a more than full time job as an engineer at a major aerospace firm in Southern California where he does trajectory design/orbital mechanics and systems engineering

Aleta Jackson, along with Jeff Greason, Dan DeLong and Doug Jones, is one of the founders of XCOR Aerospace in Mojave, CA. XCOR has designed, built and flown the EZ-Rocket and the X-Racer – which she has ridden in. Ask her about how much fun it was. XCOR is now working on the Lynx, a manned suborbital space vehicle.

The lighter, more speculative panels begin with one about a science topic I saw on David Brin’s blog.

Neurocinematics
Friday 3:00 p.m.

Neurocinematics is the study of how the brain responds (on MRI scans) to imagery in movies and ads. Will allow directors to see how engaged the viewer is during action shots or emotional scenes. Will allow advertisers to identify what sets off a pattern of brain activity that says “I want to buy this.” Movie trailers tweaked to reliably give you a rush…the science of manipulation advances.

Two panelists will kick this idea around — Phil Osborn who is into radical politics and its connections to information theory, and has a physics degree and done post-grad work in psychology and computer-based decision theory, and Buzz Dixon s a writer/editor/publisher-packager with a career spanning from the animation classics of the 1970s and 80s (Thundarr the Barbarian, G.I. Joe, Transformers, Batman, Tiny Toons) to comics (Tales of Terror, She-Hulk) to feature films (Dark Planet, Terror in Paradise, G.I. Joe: The Movie) to video games (Terminator III).  Most currently he is the creator and packager of a line of Christian manga graphic novels for the Young Adult market (Serenity and the upcoming Hits & Misses). 

And there are several more programs that will appeal to fans of science as well as science fiction:

Earth As Predictor
Sunday 11:30 a.m.

Real people are stranger than SF aliens. Using what we already know about humanity as the starting point for thinking about alien societies.
Daryl Frazetti, Richard Foss, Harry Turtledove, Louise Hitchcock, Shauna Roberts

The Science of Battlestar Galactica
Sunday 1:00 p.m.

Kevin Grazier, author of The Science of Battlestar Galactica, will talk about the BSG universe and the new “Blood and Chrome” series he’s working on.

Favorite Science Authors
Sunday 1:00

Forget the fiction, these authors write the real thing in a meaningful and interesting way.
David Bratman, Bill Patterson, Karen Anderson, Todd Brun

Hollywood Science: Ow, My Brain
Sunday 2:30 p.m.

Jordan Brown, Buzz Dixon, James Glass, Bridget Landry

Loscon GoH in Crosswords

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Emma Bull, one of Loscon 37’s guests of honor, was featured in the LA Times crossword puzzle on November 17.

Her first name was the answer to the following clue:

37 Down: “Bone Dance” sci-fi author Bull (four letters)

Science fictional references crop up in the puzzles with some regularlity and I became intrigued to know who writes them and does he or she have a connection with fandom?

Fred Piscop constructed the November 17 puzzle. By all accounts he’s a star in the world of puzzle-writing, though without any direct connection to fandom that I’ve been able to research so far:

Fred Piscop is from Bellmore, New York.  A graduate of Cornell, he took up puzzling full-time in 1995 after being laid off as a computer tech support specialist for a defense contractor.  When he’s not puzzling, he plays keyboards in a rock band, samples microbrews, and collects spelling errors in comic strips.

[Thanks to Steven H Silver for the story.]

Hour of the Wolf Howls at New Time

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Hour of the Wolf, the world’s longest-running radio program regarding science fiction and fantasy, has ended a 38-year run in the 5-7 a.m. timeslot on New York station WBAI-FM and will begin a new era as a late-night show, broadcast on the radio and streamed over the Internet live Wednesday nights/Thursday mornings from 1:30 to 3 a.m. starting Thanksgiving Eve.

Jim Freund, the show’s host and producer, will launch the new era with a show featuring one of the program’s favorite guests: science fiction and fantasy writer Richard Bowes, who has published five novels, two collections of short fiction and fifty short stories and articles. Recent and forthcoming stories appear in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and the Digital Domains, Best Gay Stories, Beastly Bride, Wilde Stories, Haunted Legends, Naked City, Nebula Awards Showcase 2011, Supernatural Noir and Blood and Other Cravings anthologies.  He has won the World Fantasy, Lambda, International Horror Guild and Million Writers Awards.

The full press release follows the jump.

Continue reading →

Jingle-Bell Rock

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The gift-giving season is upon us and here’s the perfect item for your fannish sweetie — a miniature figure of you trapped in “carbonite.”

Who wouldn’t treasure that?

Paul Pape Designs will create this personalized work of art for only $50.

Don’t delay — be sure this gets on Santa’s sleigh!

[Via James Hay.]

The Undead Bookstores of Kentucky

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The Joseph-Beth Booksellers chain, a Lexington, KY icon for years, has filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. Four of its nine locations are now walking dead – they will close by the time the company emerges from bankruptcy. 

The company’s president believes many more bookstores across America are fated to close in the near future:

“I think in the next three to five years, you’ll see half the bookstores in this country close,” Joseph-Beth Booksellers President Neil Van Uum told the Lexington Herald-Leader.

ICV2.com recently reported two other stories that amount to distress signals for book retailers.  Hastings Entertainment reported that its new book sales dropped 9.3% for the quarter ending October 31. Also, a U.S. Census report said book sales were down 7.7% in September after a 6.5% drop in August, and year-to-date book sales are down 2.6%.

[Thanks to John Mansfield for the link.]