Brust Treated for Congestive Heart Failure

Steven Brust was hospitalized with congestive heart failure on April 19. He visited a dentist for treatment of severe tooth pain but the dentist, suspecting there was a more serious issue involved, referred him to urgent care. There an EKG looked doubtful so they sent Brust along to the ER. The heart problem was diagnosed and treated:

I’m now on more drugs: something to keep my heart beat regular, and a mild diuretic.   I’m told I could use an operation to insert something into my chest that will shock my heart if it goes into, uh, I don’t remember.  Ventrical a-fib, maybe?  But it’s supposed to keep me alive.  I can no more afford the operation than I can pay the hospital bills I just incurred, BUT….

I met with a social worker, who seems confident she can get me heath care–enough to help with those bills, and get the operation, and fix my teeth, and even deal with the fucking polyp in my nose that’s been making life interesting for several years.  This is very, very good news.  I am actually feeling hopeful.

I’ve never forgotten Jack Chalker’s autobiographical essay for the Fantasy Amateur Press Association that described in frank detail his severe dental problems, and echoed the warning he’d received that dental infections can lead to heart trouble.

It’s such a common problem that the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services issued a warning in this PSA:

Having bad teeth seems to be related to having a bad heart. A look at data on close to 42,000 people finds that the risk of heart disease goes up with the number of teeth people lose. The report in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine said eight and one half percent of people who lost all their teeth had heart disease.

But what could link teeth and hearts? Researcher Paul Eke of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention thinks gum disease may be the common culprit:

“Gum disease is caused by a silent, chronic infection of the tissues surrounding the teeth, that can lead to tooth loss. It is the systemic consequences of chronic infection that may increase your risk for cardiovascular disease and stroke.”

Good to know Brust got a timely diagnosis.

[Thanks to Lee Gold for the story.]

2012 First Fandom Award Nominees

First Fandom members have until June 1 to vote on the proposed candidates for three awards:

First Fandom Hall of Fame Award: (Note: It is possible for all the nominees in this category to receive the award.)

  • Ray Bradbury
  • Larry Farsace
  • Claude Held
  • Jack Robins

First Fandom Posthumous Hall of Fame Award

  • Rusty Hevelin

Sam Moskowitz Archive Award

  • Donn Albright

The winners will be announced during Chicon 7.

2012 FAAn Award Winners

The winners of the 2012 FAAn Awards were announced April 22 at Corflu Glitter. Here are the results posted by Geri Sullivan.

Best Website: eFanzines.com, hosted by Bill Burns

Harry Warner Jr. Memorial Award Best Letterhack; Robert Lichtman

Best Perzine: A Meara for Observers, ed. Mike Meara

Best Single Issue or Anthology: Alternative Pants,ed. Randy Byers

Best Fan Artist: Steve Stiles

Best Fan Writer: Mark Plummer

Best Genzine or Collaboration: Banana Wings, eds. Mark Plummer and Claire Brialey

#1 Fan Face: Mark Plummer

Snapshots 80 Days Around the World

Here are 8 developments of interest to fans:

(1) The Center for Disease Control has discovered more people pay attention to emergency preparedness messages about fake emergencies

As our own director, Dr. Ali Khan, notes, “If you are generally well equipped to deal with a zombie apocalypse you will be prepared for a hurricane, pandemic, earthquake, or terrorist attack.” So please log on, get a kit, make a plan, and be prepared!

(2) With all the talk about zombies, it should be no surprise to learn that someone’s getting answers from dead men – see the Washington Post article, ”Asking old human tissue to answer new scientific questions”

Pirates used to say that “dead men tell no tales.” Of course, the buccaneers had never heard of the polymerase chain reaction. Dead men turn out to be loaded with information if you can get your hands on them — or better yet, on small preserved pieces.

(3) The Rule of Three allows one more reference to the undead.. Wired magazine’s “A Brief History of Vampire Fiction” begins:

The author who invented the vampire story thought he was being funny.

“The Vampyre,” first published anonymously in 1819, was taken to be the work of the famous poet (and early 19th-century equivalent of a tabloid celebrity) Lord Byron, but turned out to be by Byron’s personal physician (and devoted hanger-on), Dr. John Polidori.

Its plot nugget was by Byron, in an uncompleted story dashed off for that ghost-story competition Mary Shelley (then Mary Godwin) won with Frankenstein, but Polidori worked it up into something publishable which, nearly two centuries on, remains smart, tart and readable.

(4) Colin Harris says the Chicon 7 Hugo team is working hard to complete the Hugo Voter Packet. Look for it in early May. For those wanting a head start, he points out that links to free copies of many short fiction nominees are already listed on Worlds Without End  — click for Novellas, Novelettes and Short Stories.

(5) The 2014 Worldcon committee will be eligible to give Retro Hugo Awards – if they want to. Steve Cooper of the unopposed London bid said they are seriously considering it because 2014 will be the 75th Anniversary of the very first Worldcon.

The rules provide for optional Retro Hugos on certain anniversaries of Worldcons that either took place before the award was invented (or in the case of the 1953 committee, just didn’t feel like giving it). If given, the hypothetical 2014 Retro Hugo Awards will  go to science fiction and fantasy published in 1938.

(6) SF Site reports author Tananarive Due has been named to fill the Cosby Chair for the Humanities at Spelman College for the 2012-13 academic year. Drs. William and Camille Cosby endowed the chair at the historically African-American college in 1987 to support professorships in the fine arts, humanities, and the social sciences.

(7) After a high school English teacher in North Dakota used Kurt Vonnegut’s novel, Slaughterhouse-Five, in his classroom in 1971, the president of the school board demanded all of the copies be burned in the school furnace due to the book’s “obscene language.” Letters of Note has posted Kurt Vonnegut’s rebuke:

I gather from what I read in the papers and hear on television that you imagine me, and some other writers, too, as being sort of ratlike people who enjoy making money from poisoning the minds of young people. I am in fact a large, strong person, fifty-one years old, who did a lot of farm work as a boy, who is good with tools. I have raised six children, three my own and three adopted. They have all turned out well. Two of them are farmers. I am a combat infantry veteran from World War II, and hold a Purple Heart. I have earned whatever I own by hard work. I have never been arrested or sued for anything. I am so much trusted with young people and by young people that I have served on the faculties of the University of Iowa, Harvard, and the City College of New York. Every year I receive at least a dozen invitations to be commencement speaker at colleges and high schools. My books are probably more widely used in schools than those of any other living American fiction writer.

(8) If Josh Gross keeps writing like this, the Boise Weekly‘s “New Media Czar” will earn a spot in every fan’s must-read list:

In her book on writing, The Art of Fiction, Ayn Rand said no fiction writer should ever use real people or contemporary events. She said her original draft of The Fountainhead included Hitler, but she later cut him out because she wasn’t sure anyone would know who he was in 10 years. While she was obviously wrong, the principle stands, and today we’re seeing why.

The President’s Vampire by Christopher Farnsworth, opened with Bin Laden’s assassination—by a vampire who stuffed a grenade in his mouth and then threw him over a cliff so he exploded in midair. Also, Bin Laden was actually a giant lizard, genetically modified by a vast international conspiracy of reptillian humanoids.

Doesn’t that prove Ayn Rand’s rule? Doesn’t that sound less plausible now than it did before Bin Laden’s death?

[Thanks for these links goes out to David Klaus, John King Tarpinian, Andrew Porter, Isaac Alexander, and Steven H Silver.]

Gene DeWeese (1931-2012)

Gene DeWeese died on March 19. “He had been in great pain (physical and mental) from Lewy body dementia,” reports Mike Lowrey, “and it finally took him pretty suddenly, after months of pain and mental suffering had traumatized [him and his wife, Bev] badly.”

Bev and Gene had been married for many years. Beverly Amers and Juanita Wellons formed the Eastern Indiana Science Fiction Association (EISFA) in the early 1950s and in time wed two other club members, Buck Coulson and Gene DeWeese.

Buck revealed in a Pixel interview:

When we first got acquainted, he wrote voluminous letters to loads of people but would barely say two words in a face-to-face contact. A friend of mine met him once, and after he’d left, asked, “Does he talk?”

The Coulsons’ fanzine Yandro won the Hugo in 1965. About the same time, Buck and Gene launched pro careers as collaborators on a couple of Man From U.N.C.L.E. novels. DeWeese remembered:

The U.N.C.L.E. books were the first sales Buck and I had made, in fact the first things either of us had written longer than a short story, so we considered them a great ‘earn-while-you-learn’ program.

The team of DeWeese and Coulson wrote several sf novels, plus two murder mysteries set at Worldcons, Now You See It/Him/Them (1975) and Charles Fort Never Mentioned Wombats (1977), filled with references and in-jokes. Another reference-filled short story  “Queen of the Timies,” appeared in Mike Resnick’s Alternate Worldcons (1994), in which Time Tunnel fans gather to honor Time Fleet Admiral Bjo Trimble and the show’s creator, Gene Roddenberry, presents a special cut of “The Trouble with Trimbles.”

DeWeese, writing solo, also did novels based on TV sf shows like Star Trek and Lost in Space and wrote gothics under a pen name. His YA novel The Adventures of a Two-Minute Werewolf was made into a TV movie. His last story may have been “The World of Null-T,” published in 2010.

Before turning to fiction DeWeese was a technical writer in the Apollo program of the 1960s.

With Christopher Priest’s name being bandied about lately, it’s an interesting coincidence that DeWeese once named him as one of the authors he especially liked:

Gene: I’ve always read both sf and mysteries — PLANET STORIES and Clarke and Erle Stanley Gardner in grade and high school, Priest and Clarke, Gorman and Pronzini, etc., now.

[Thanks to Mike Lowrey, Steven H Silver and Andrew Porter for the story.]

Original Dark Shadows Vampire Dies

Jonathan Frid, the original Barnabas Collins in the gothic soap opera Dark Shadows, died (of all days) Friday, April 13. He was 87.

Although Frid had been in declining health for several months, he did film some cameo scenes for the new Tim Burton-directed film starring Johnny Depp.

Created by Dan Curtis, the gothic soap opera with Frid originally aired on ABC between June 1966 and April 2, 1971. Frid also played the role of Barnabas in the House of Dark Shadows movie.

[Thanks to Bjo Trimble and Andrew Porter for the story.]

K. D. Wentworth (1951-2012)

Author K. D. Wentworth died April 18 reports SF Site.

She began her career in 1988 with a win in the Writers of the Future contest and went on to publish nine novels and over 50 short stories. Three of Wentworth’s short stories were Nebula finalists: “Tall One,” “Burning Bright,” and “Born Again.”

Coming full circle, she became a Judge in the Writers of the Future Contest in 2000. She also served as Secretary of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA) in 2000 and 2003.

In addition to writing, she taught elementary school for many years, retiring in 2003.

YA Hugo Proposal

A proposal to create a Best Young Adult Book Hugo category has been submitted to the Chicon 7 business meeting by Juli Hanslip, Lou Berger, Dan Kimmel, Stu Segal, Bobbi DuFault and Chris M. Barkley.

Barkley reports the category definition is:

(a) A young adult science fiction or fantasy book of any length published in the previous calendar year.

(b) Any work nominated in this category may not be simultaneously considered, if eligible, in any other fiction category.

(c) Two years after being implemented, this Constitutional Amendment may be repealed by a simple majority vote at the subsequent Main Business Meeting.

(A young adult book is defined as one in which the author(s) and/or the publisher specifically targeted a potential nominee to this intended audience. In the event of any confusion on the issue, the Hugo Administrator may inquire with the author(s) of potential nominated work for clarification.)

Note: The parenthetical phrase is part of the proposed rule.

Barkley and others submitted a YA Hugo motion last year at Renovation which was disposed of by a vote to object to consideration, although this was done in the expectation he would come back with a revision in 2012.

Before Watchmen Panel at C2E2

James Bacon said in an e-mail, “I got the opportunity to see a Before Watchmen presentation, so I told the Vice President I was pissed off.”

“Biden?” I wondered. But no, James’ report for Comic Buzz shows he meant someone with real power — in the comics industry:

I waited a little, then approached the stage…trying to catch Dan Didio [Co-Publishers of DC Comics]…. He leaned over, and I said; ‘I’m one of those angry guys, you’ve pissed me off with this, and I didn’t want you thinking people like me are not here’.

The panel also featured several of the talents who are working on Before Watchmen. One of them addressed the controversy in fandom about enlarging on Alan Moore’s creation:

JMS [J. Michael Straczynski] fields the question about how he is dealing with criticism. He explains that on an ‘Emotional level’ he ‘gets it’, but goes on to state that DC ‘Legally and contractually have the right.’ to do this. As an analogy for the use of Watchmen characters, he makes mention of Hyde from League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and wondered Robert Louis Stevens approve of Mr Hyde raping a character to death. He of course makes light of this analogy, saying it will be reported out of context, but I don’t think the specific is the issue, rather that this is a weak argument, Stevenson is dead, and the copyright for his character is available, Hyde is used cleverly in another work, not rewritten as a whole novel. Its a poor comparison, and one that sits badly with me, but the crowd lap it up.

Check the report for more information and reaction about DC’s new project.

Clarke Center Created at UCSD

The Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination is being created at UC San Diego (UCSD) by the University of California, San Diego and the Arthur C. Clarke Foundation.

The Clarke Center will develop, catalyze and be a global resource for innovative research and education “drawing upon the under-utilized resources of human imagination.” It will span a wide range of disciplines and fields such as technology, education, engineering, health, science, industry, environment, entertainment and the arts. 

The center will work with academia and industry and also draw upon the creative worlds of media and the arts. Contemporary science fiction authors such as UC San Diego alumni David Brin, Kim Stanley Robinson, Vernor Vinge, Greg Benford and Greg Bear are involved.

Sheldon Brown, named the center’s director, is a professor in the Department of Visual Arts at UCSD and the former director of the Center for Research in Computing and the Arts at UCSD’s California Institute of Telecommunications and Information Technologies. 

Brown said:

As we harness more and more technology, we must also nurture our human resources – including our unique gifts of imagination to create, innovate and sustain constructive advances. By making human imagination itself the subject of study, we can develop ways to make more effective use of it.  We believe the center can become a unique global resource near term and long term.

The Clarke Foundation chose UCSD from among several universities that responded to its request for proposals to create the new center.

[Thanks to Gregory Benford for the story.]