Monthly Archives: July 2011

Hertz on Collectingsf.com

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John Hertz’ contribution to Collectingsf.com for July 2011 is a review of Eleanor Cameron’s classic The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet (1954):

We remember Mr. Bass, who keeps saying “precisely” although he confesses he is like a cook who can’t tell anyone else afterward just how he did it.  We remember his house on Thallo Street, and his newspaper want ad written, as Northcote Parkinson taught in Parkinson’s Law three years later, to draw only one answer, the right one.  We remember Mrs. Pennyfeather the hen, and the oxygen urn that went phee-eep, and the wise men who weren’t very wise….

This book also will be the subject for a discussion group at Renovation.

Star Trek/Legion of Superheroes Pair Up

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The original crew of the Starship Enterprise will join forces with the Legion of Superheroes in the DC Universe when IDW Publishing begins a new six-issue monthly series this October.

You can always count on a glitch in the ship’s transporter to plant the Enterprise crew in the middle of a crisis. (It’s a wonder people ever willingly step into the thing.)  As the press release explains:

STAR TREK/LEGION OF SUPERHEROES tells the tale of the original crew of the Starship Enterprise, who beam down to a planet only to discover that the planet isn’t their intended destination, or even in the right universe…

Where they end up the “United Federation of Planets… is now the Imperial Planets of Terra, a dark empire focused on war and conquest…” No mention whether they encounter a mirror Spock in a goatee, but we can hope.

If they ever do another of these I’d like to send a different set of DC superheroes on an adventure with the crew of the Enterprise. Let’s return to “The City on the Edge of Forever.” Edith Keeler’s 1930s, Depression-era New York is the perfect place for Kirk, Spock and McCoy to join Batman and Superman battling gangsters and mad scientists.

Or here’s my other idea — imagine Spock at the controls of his breadboarded transporter, vacuum tubes glowing, as he tries to save baby Kal-El’s capsule from entering Earth’s atmosphere…

(J.J. Abrams, I am available to consult if any of this is working for you.)

[Thanks to David Klaus for the story.]

Categories Set for 2012 FAAn Awards

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The Fan Activity Achievement Awards (FAAN Awards) categories have been tweaked in readiness for next year reports Arnie Katz in Glitter #20.

Administrator Andy Hooper has determined the 2012 categories will be: Best Genzine, Best Perzine, Best Fan Writer, Best Fan Artist, Best Fan Website, Best Letterhack (Harry Warner Jr. Memorial Award) and Best Anthology or Single Issue.

The Number One Fan Face will be determined by point totals in the seven categories.

Also, Hooper is looking for faneds who will pub their ish between Thanksgiving 2011 and February 1, 2012 to distribute a paper FAAn Awards ballot as a rider. If you’re willing to help, e-mail him at this edress — fanmailaph (at) aol (dot) com.

Byers: The Lead Dog Speaks

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By Randy Byers: The World Organization Of Faneditors (WOOF) will once again distribute an APA at the Worldcon this year, and you are invited to contribute a fanzine to the project. Please feel free to share this announcement far and wide.

Since Renovation is the 69th Worldcon, copy count this year is 69. There will be a drop box in the Fan Lounge for your contribution, or if you can’t make it to the convention and can’t find a courier, you can mail your contribution to Randy Byers at 1013 N 36th St, Seattle WA 98103, USA. If you are mailing your contribution, it must arrive at this address by August 16th.

Collation of the distribution will be in the Fan Lounge at noon on Saturday the 20th. Volunteers to help with the collation are welcome to join in the fun.

If you are planning to contribute a zine, please contact me with the title and page count so I can put them in the Table of Contents. You can e-mail this information to me at [email protected], or mail it to the above address.

I’ve already had a number of first-time contributors express interest in participating this year. Whether you’re a first-timer or an old-timer, I hope you’ll take part as well.

[Randy Byers is WOOF’s Official Editor this year.]

Pluto’s Pathetic Publicity Stunt

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Pluto, quit pretending you’re a planet already. You are not fooling anybody.

Did you think we’d be impressed when the Hubble Telescope so conveniently discovered you have a fourth moon?

You weren’t a planet when you had three moons, and nothing has been changed by adding another flying fragment with poles no farther apart than the distance I drive to work.

It isn’t even big enough to deserve a mythological name. If there’s any justice the four moons of Pluto will end up being called Charon, Nix and Hydra and Spot.

Robert Lesser Pulp Art Collection on Display

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"Golden City of Titan" by Frank R. Paul, Amazing Stories 1941

The Museum of American Illustration is displaying 90 works of pulp art collected by Robert Lesser, now a promised gift to the New Britain Museum of American Art:

Pulp Art flaunted unsettling images of violence, racism, sex, and crime. The publishing houses that produced pulp fiction such as Popular Publications, Street & Smith, Condé Nast, and Frank A. Munsey Company destroyed much of the artwork produced for the magazines after printing. The images weren’t suitable for display in homes or museums so artists and auctioneers deemed them worthless. Tens of thousands of pulp paintings were created, out of which only a small number survive today.

Lesser is the author of A Celebration of Comic Art and Memorabilia (1975) and Pulp Art: Original Cover Paintings for the Great American Pulp Magazines (1997), the latter a full-color collection of pulp paintings and history.

The Museum is located at 128 East 63 St. in Manhattan. The exhibit runs until July 30

[Thanks to Andrew Porter for the story.]

It’s Actually Perfectly Clear

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I am not a fan of journalists who use the phrase “it was not immediately clear,” something I find in news stories nearly every day.

Here’s an example from an account of a menacing speech by Qaddafi:

“These people (the Libyans) are able to one day take this battle … to Europe, to target your homes, offices, families, which would become legitimate military targets, like you have targeted our homes,” [Qaddafi] said…

It was not immediately clear whether Qaddafi could make good on such threats.

“It was not immediately clear” conveys the feeling that the reporter took a reasonable amount of time sifting sources for facts a person might ordinarily expect to find, then reluctantly gave up. In practice, this phrase is nearly always an announcement that the writer is about to spin a story based on no greater authority than his or her own opinion.

In the Qaddafi story the writer uses the phrase in a scoffing way, to indicate he/she does not consider the threats credible. Much easier scoff than interview a general, terrorism expert or diplomat about them.

At other times this is literally a question-begging phrase, as in a recent story about the Commissioner of Baseball:

It was not immediately clear whether Selig would publicly explain his decision.

Here the reporter plainly wanted to know more about the agenda behind one of Selig’s decisions. Nothing wrong with that, it’s the kind of thing a reporter should be digging for. So why didn’t he ask? Had the reporter questioned the best available source of information – Selig — this story would have read — “When asked if he would publicly explain his decision –” followed by Selig’s answer or refusal to comment.

Maybe in this case “it was not immediately clear” was code for “Hey, my editor is posting this story on our website in four minutes, no time to call for a comment!”

Whether “it was not immediately clear” is a wedge making room in a story for the reporter’s personal opinion, or a worthless IOU for questions that ought to have been asked of a real source, it’s a terribly abused phrase.

2011 Mythopoeic Award Winners

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The winners of the 2011 Mythopoeic Awards were announced at Mythcon 42 in Albuquerque on July 17:

Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Adult Literature
Karen Lord, Redemption in Indigo (Small Beer Press)

Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Children’s Literature
Megan Whalen Turner, The Queen’s Thief series, consisting of The Thief, The Queen of Attolia, The King of Attolia, and A Conspiracy of Kings (Greenwillow Books)

Mythopoeic Scholarship Award in Inklings Studies
Michael Ward, Planet Narnia: The Seven Heavens in the Imagination of C.S. Lewis (Oxford Univ. Press, 2008)

Mythopoeic Scholarship Award in Myth and Fantasy Studies
Caroline Sumpter, The Victorian Press and the Fairy Tale (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008)

Who’s on First, What’s on 2015?

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An Orlando in 2015 Worldcon bid has been trying to leak news of itself to the internet since its first tweet on June 27. The bidders started a Facebook page and a website touting plans to use the Coronado Springs Resort at Walt Disney World. What finally attracted attention was fans’ realization that the bid hadn’t identified any committee members.

“Who are these guys?” became an irresistible mystery to be solved by Secret Masters of Fandom unwilling to wait for the promised announcement at this year’s Worldcon in Reno. Opinion was divided about whether the secrecy represented a clever ploy to make people talk about the bid beforehand, was a byproduct of the accidental public unveiling of a website under construction, or possibly all of the above.

It wasn’t hard to start outing the committee once people got interested. Even an unsophisticated computer user like me thought of running a WHOIS search. I just wasn’t the first person to actually do it.

The Orlando in 2015 domain was registered by Adam Beaton from Strongville, Ohio. He has chaired Ohayocon, a winter animé convention in Columbus, multiple times.

Once that information was published Beaton announced that, yes, he is bid chairman of the Orlando in 2015 committee. He remains the only identified member at this writing.

Beaton is working on the 2011 Worldcon committee as the Anime Room Manager and leader of the “Vignettes” project. His experience with other recent Worldcons is not readily apparent – Beaton’s name does not appear in the membership lists published in the Denvention III (2008), Anticipation (2009) or Aussiecon 4 (2010) souvenir books.

However, once pulled into the public eye Beaton did not hesitate to take a swing at the rival Spokane in 2015 bid, characterizing it as an attempt to run another Northwestern U.S. Worldcon too soon after this year’s event in Reno. He wrote online, “We felt having two Worldcons like that in such a short time-span (2011, 2015) was a disservice to the idea of a travelling con.”

Hertz: Byers Will WOOF

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By John Hertz: I’m happy to say Randy Byers will be Official Editor of WOOF for Renovation (2011 Worldcon).  

WOOF, the World Organization Of Faneditors, is an apa (Amateur Press Ass’n) collated annually  — yes — another product of Bruce Pelz’ imagination — at the Worldcon. I believe, without looking, this year’s will be WOOF 36. The 2010 OE was Alan Stewart. The 2009 OE was Lloyd Penney.  

Byers is one of the triumvirs who publish Chunga, was the 2003 TAFF (Trans-Atlantic Fan Fund) delegate, and is a fine fellow.  

Collation will be at noon in the Fanzine Lounge on Saturday — not Sunday, Monday isn’t a holiday in this year’s Worldcon weekend.