David Cake announces that nominations are being taken for the 2012 Fan Fund of Australia and New Zealand (FFANZ) race. FFANZ will send one Australian fan to attend the 2012 New Zealand Natcon, unCONventional, in Auckland from June 1-4.
The full announcement follows the jump.
[Thanks to John Coxon for the story.]
By Sam Long: The latest issue of The New Yorker magazine has a short story by Michael Chabon, titled “Citizen Conn” that may be of some interest to fans.
Set in a Jewish old-folk’s home in LA, it’s the story of the interaction of the home’s rabbi (a woman), a resident (Feather), and an old associate of his (Conn). Feather and Conn went to the same high school before WWII, and they were both nerds (or whatever the equivalent at that time was). They both became comic book artists and writers back in the ‘40s through the ‘60s, very much into superheros, and quite famous among comics fans of the time, but they had a falling out long ago. Conn wants to renew their friendship but Feather won’t cooperate. Kind of a sad story, (Oh, and the rabbi’s husband is a latter-day comics enthusiast—I won’t say comixfan exactly, but he remembers the C & F comics from when he was a kid.) Astounding Stories, Doc Smith, Edmund Hamilton, and H. P. Lovecraft get a mention.
Editor’s P.S. An interviewer asked Chabon if the characters are based on anyone:
Well, the obvious answer is Stan Lee and Jack Kirby. Stan and Jack met in the forties, began collaborating during lean times in the fifties, jointly revived the fortunes of Marvel Comics in the sixties, and then underwent a creative divorce that seems to have resulted in a certain amount of acrimony on Kirby’s side.
Todd E. Frazier
Ed Meskys reports that Todd Frazier, his friend and partner in the fanzine Niekas, died February 8. He was 57.
Two papers in Frazier’s hometown ran obituaries, The Citizen of Laconia here and the Laconia Sun here.
Sherwood Frazier said about his brother, Todd’s, interest in sf and fantasy:
Growing up Todd developed an early interest in books and reading. He had amassed a very respectable comic book collection and was an avid stamp collector in his younger years. His real passion when it came to books however; was Science Fiction & Fantasy, his apartment was a reflection of this with numerous book cases of SF & F books, futuristic art on the walls, and mementoes of the many Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Star Trek conventions he had traveled to. This interest led him to Ed Meskys of Moultonborough with whom he edited and helped publish a quarterly “Fanzine” about the genre of Science Fiction & Fantasy entitled “Niekas” for many years.
Barry Newton copied File 770 on the latest about Judy Newton’s bypass surgery:
First, let me thank you all for the comfort and support we’ve been getting. It means a lot, believe me. Also, please keep on with prayers and good thoughts, they seem to be working.
I got down there in good time to be there when they took a good 25 minutes unhooking support devices and making them portable with her bed, then went along until they shunted me into a waiting room. A large waiting room, which gradually filled with a lot of visiting families. There was a lot of surgery happening today. Judy’s was the first of four that her doctor had scheduled. Some four nervous hours later, the surgeon appeared with the welcome news that everything had gone well, and Judy had five dear God bypasses.
The rest of the day was spent ducking in and out of ICU on short visits. She eventually woke up, was able to respond to the staff–and to me–eventually got the breathing tube out, and actually could talk. If all continues to go well, she’ll be moved out of ICU sometime tomorrow, and even encouraged to spend some time on her feet. This just blows my mind. Home sometime next week, probably Thursday.
And a correction to the earlier post – Judy Newton was WSFA President last year. Barry Newton is the current President and he adds, “Yes, this was all very amicable–other interests forced her to make a choice.”
Seeing that prospective Congressional candidate Michael A. Burstein might have to run against a Kennedy, I asked if that was much of a deterrent. He answered:
I see running against Joe Kennedy III as a welcome challenge, not a deterrent. I do like the way Universal Hub put it: The “Kennedy Inevitability”.
The Hub says “His Inevitableness” did scare away a Boston City Councilor who thought about moving to Brookline to make a run for Barney Frank’s seat.
Interestingly, in covering Burstein’s exploratory committee The Hub headlined his role as a “Pluto Defender” and in the body of the article identified him as an “ardent supporter of Pluto’s role as the ninth planet in our solar system.” Burstein is President of the Society for the Preservation of Pluto as a Planet. I wonder if in Massachusetts this is considered espousing a conservative position?
Two years ago President Obama said his ultimate goal was to land astronauts on Mars. But how likely is that to happen if the stepping stones are being cancelled?
Scientists say NASA is about to propose major cuts in its exploration of other planets, especially Mars. And NASA’s former science chief is calling it irrational….
Two scientists who were briefed on the 2013 NASA budget that will be released next week said the space agency is eliminating two proposed joint missions with Europeans to explore Mars in 2016 and 2018.
NASA’s budget is being squeezed, in part, by the expense of finishing the James Webb Space Telescope, the more powerful successor to the Hubble Telescope which is now expected to cost around $8 billion instead of the originally estimated $3.5 billion.
[Thanks to Taral Wayne for the story.]
For a chance to win The Lord of the Rings Trilogy Extended Edition on Blu-ray, all you have to do is like The Return of the Ring’s Facebook page before midnight February 14, Valentine’s Day. The competition is open to anyone in the world, to both new and pre-existing fans of the Facebook page. The winner will be selected at random.
This giveaway promotes The Return of the Ring, The Tolkien Society’s summer extravaganza at Loughborough University in England, August 16-20. Guests include Tom Shippey, Ted Nasmith, Verlyn Flieger, Kate Madison (director, Born of Hope), Chris Bouchard (director, The Hunt for Gollum), Corey Olsen (The Tolkien Professor), Jef Murray and, our Guest of Honour, Brian Sibley.
I figure Shippey and Flieger deserve the plug after all they’ve done for mythopoeic studies.
By Andrew Porter: According to a Nature program on PBS last evening — Raccoon Nation — when Sterling North’s novel Rascal, about a boy and his raccoon, with cover and interior illustrations by SF artist John Schoenherr, was published, it set off a chain of events which were to lead to ecological disaster in Japan. Made into an anime, thousands of Japanese children implored their parents to buy them a pet raccoon. Pet importers brought them into Japan, where they are not native. When they became mature they were destructive and unmanageable, and they ended up being released into forests across the country.
Raccoons have bred into an enormous population, unchecked by natural predators. Their predilection for roosting in trees has meant they have moved en masse into Japanese temples, where, according to the program, they’ve done more damage in the last few decades than in the previous 700 years, tearing up roofs, destroying timbers and turning centuries-old wooden floors into urine and feces-soaked nests.
From Wikipedia:
North published his most famous work, Rascal, in 1963. The book is a remembrance of a year in his childhood when he raised a baby raccoon which he named Rascal. It received a Newbery Honor in 1964, a Sequoyah Book Award in 1966, and a Young Reader’s Choice Award in 1966. It was made into the Disney movie of the same name in 1969. Additionally, it was made into a 52-episode Japanese anime entitled Araiguma Rasukaru.?Araiguma Rascal means Racoon Rascal. The success of the anime was responsible for the unfortunate introduction of the North American Raccoon into Japan.
The success of Rascal was good news for Schoenherr. The success of the book launched a new career illustrating books, and within several years he ceased to illustrate science fiction.
Judy Newton, president of the Washington Science Fiction Association, was hospitalized after having a heart attack on February 8. She will undergo bypass surgery on Friday.
[Thanks to Rich Lynch for the story.]
Sure, anybody can sell you a book through the internet but here’s a radical idea — what if the book was already located in a building in your town where you could drive and get it immediately without waiting for delivery?
Darned if those crazy cats at Amazon haven’t stolen a march on the rest of the industry with their plan to build a bricks-and-mortar store in Seattle.
The store will market e-readers like Kindle and Kindle Fire, and Amazon-published books (which, incidentally, the Canadian chain Indigo is refusing to stock.)
[Thanks to John Mansfield for the story.]