The first 26 issues of The Mad 3 Party are now available online here. Published from 1984-1990, it promoted the Boston in ’89 bid by creating a focal point for strategic discussions of Worldcon running. It won the Hugo in 1990.
Laurie Mann edited the first issue, Pat Vandenberg was editor from early 1984 until early 1986, and Leslie Turek from 1986-1990.
Contributions to Mad 3 were always high quality and innovative, if more technical than literary. These issues constantly remind a reader how ideas that once were just a twinkle in somebody’s eye became traditional features of Worldcons.
The Boston bid won and Mad 3 continued appearing during the run up to Noreascon 3 and for a short while after. A major shakeup in the availability of N3’s planned facilities forced the committee to become very creative in organizing and staging the con. These ideas often got their first public airing and discussion in Mad 3 in these pre-internet days.
Not that fans related all that differently before the internet. As Leslie Turek wrote in “My Life As A Faned” —
During this period, I did get to practice one skill that I had started to learn as chair of N2 [Noreascon 2, 1980]: explaining policy decisions to people who didn’t know all the background facts, and writing calm and rational responses to angry letters.
Scanned by Tim Szczesuil, the available issues run from 1983 through mid-1988.
“But, hey,” I said, “I know the references involved. They were common knowledge in the world of science-fiction fandom in the 1950s!” Weird thing: Apparently, common knowledge to a generation of people devoted to the wonders of the future has not been universally transferred from survivors of that generation to the future that is our present.
If historians or critics fifty years from now were to read most of our contemporary literary fiction, they might well infer that our main societal problems were issues with our parents, bad relationships, and death. If they were looking for any indication that we were even dimly aware of the burgeoning global conflict between democracy and capitalism, or of the abyssal catastrophe our civilization was just beginning to spill over the brink of, they might need to turn to books that have that embarrassing little Saturn-and-spaceship sticker on the spine. That is, to science fiction…
Sharknado will be surpassed, someday. Those who would say that’s impossible are forgetting the lessons of Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus. Humanity’s capacity for invention is limitless, as limitless as the possible combinations of dangerous animals and threatening weather spectacles.
07. Jonathan Maberry: Jon is probably the least appreciated artist to be featured in this list, which is a bit strange. Don’t get me wrong, he’s a very successful author, but the truth of the matter is, he deserves a wealth more respect than he’s already extended. The guy is damn good, to be blunt. A versatile author, Maberry’s pumped out some terrifying tales. Just check out the entire Pine Deep trilogy, his Joe Ledger series (Patient Zero is great) and if you dig the current zombie craze, don’t pass on Dead of Night.
(7) Let’s split California into six states urges technology investor Tim Draper: “It is about time California was properly represented with Senators in Washington. Now our number of Senators per person will be about average.” He plans to file a ballot initiative allowing voters to divide up California.
The California Supreme Court would almost certainly rule that such a measure cannot go on the ballot as an initiative because one can only amend, but not revise, the state Constitution. Under the state supreme court’s test for revisions (most recently in a case involving the Proposition 8 anti-same sex marriage measure), splitting the state into six would count as a revision.
(8) Then, after California is split, “Get ready to tie up your boat to Idaho” as the old song goes. Drownyourtown, a Tumblr site, visualizes cityscapes flooded as a result of icecaps melting. There are views for San Diego, San Francisco, and Oakland, among others.
“Keir Dullea, gone tomorrow,” Noël Coward once quipped about the handsome actor, who is probably best known for playing the astronaut in “2001: A Space Odyssey.”
But not only is Mr. Dullea, 77, still here, he was signing autographs not long ago with his “2001” co-star Gary Lockwood, greeting fans who paid to meet the sci-fi legends and walk away with a personalized still photograph from the film.
The competition, however, was stiff.
“He doesn’t have that much of a crowd,” a scruffy looking attendee noted. Well, it may not have been as big as Corey Feldman’s, but he seemed to be drawing more than the janitor from “The Breakfast Club.”
The “battle action” story Bung? Stray Dogs centers around a league of literary figures with supernatural powers…. Brown himself will have the power of “Inferno” — the ability to compose a three-line poem that offers a glimpse of “hell.” The “hell” is actually a reflection of what the real world would be like, 33 minutes from now, so anyone who can decipher the poem can predict the future. Unfortunately, “only Brown himself has the historical and religious knowledge to decipher the poems.” (Not coincidentally, Brown’s latest novel, Inferno, debuted in English and Japanese this year.)
(11) But wait! This is how Star Trek: Into Darkness should have ended (superseding all previous attempts along that line.) Given the power, David Klaus would rename this HISHE video — Star Trek Into Torchwood: Miracle Day.
[Thanks for these links goes out to Dan Goodman, Willard Stone, Petréa Mitchell, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian and David Klaus.]
Dave Langford is incensed to discover his Ansible site, the SF Encyclopedia and many other websites of the science fiction field are being filtered by British internet service providers attempting to comply with UK legislation that created what is satirically referred to as the “Great Firewall of David Cameron.”
He provides full details in an SFE post “SF Encyclopedia – unsuitable for under-18s?” with screen captures from O2‘s “website status checker” page that can be used to research what is blocked by default by that particular ISP — accessible only if a subscriber opts-in using the Parental Controls.
A 16-year-old Australian fan of Doctor Who has launched a petition to name a planet Gallifrey. He’s picked a big orange planet that fits what little is known about the Doctor’s homeworld.
Sam Menhennet is asking the International Astronomical Union to make it official —
Please rename the newly discovered planet “HD 106906 b” to Gallifrey! In honour of Doctor Who and its 50 years! even if it’s just a second name or officially recognised as “also known as Gallifrey”. Doctor Who is legendary, award winning, record breaking, and global and this planet deserves something special and supernatural as its name, How better to honor its existence than by dubbing it the home planet of our beloved time travelling alien, The Doctor?
Menhennet may have been inspired by the revelation in Day of the Doctor, released in theaters for a single day to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the series, that Gallifrey still exists, and was not destroyed in a battle between the Time Lords and the Daleks as believed.
“It’s locked in a single moment of time, in a pocket universe,” Sam explains helpfully.
Pushed to explain what that might mean, Sam demurs. “I’m not really into science – I find it boring at school – but I love the show.”
A science fiction fan bored by science? No wonder Gregory Benford weeps for this genre…
Starting to feel panicky because you haven’t a clue what to send that special fannish someone? Send the “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet!” diorama from Captainco!
Amazing statue based on the sci-fi TV series The Twilight Zone.
This diorama recreates the terrifying episode that starred William Shatner.
Features Bob Wilson, The Gremlin, and a portion of the airplane!
The white four-engine airliner comes mounted on a black base with a spiral Twilight Zone logo. And the big picture of Rod on the box is the ultimate seal of approval.
By John Hertz: I drank tea with Jerry Pournelle. Our ordinary protocol is to meet for lunch and disagree. We did this for a change. His study upstairs is floor-to-ceiling books, which is, as a woman I know likes to say, as it should be. The canister of Peet’s Golden Dragon Oolong on the tray he carried up I might have given him myself, I forget. We talked of Dante, Leka I of Albania, Patrick O’Brian.
At Loscon XL on a Classics of S-F panel he’d complained that looking back at past s-f one will find the science laughable. I reminded him of our Classics panel at Cascadiacon about Starman Jones – chosen upon that very point – where he’d said various brilliant things; at Renovation where I led solo a book talk about From the Earth to the Moon people kept getting into the acceleration of the projectile but somewhat goaded by me came to the pacing of the narrative. He acknowledged Churchill’s studying Macaulay’s History of England as a writer despite its provoking Churchill to compose Marlborough as a historian. Churchill’s magnanimity throughout his memoir The Second World War, to Stafford Cripps, to Darlan, to Stalin, struck us both.
It’s the 100th birthday of Alfred Bester (18 Dec 1913– 30 Sep 1987). Despite carefully quoting “On the Banks of the Old Raritan” in “The Animal Fair”– with glances at Doctor Dolittle, Freddy the Pig, Milne’s “Disobedience”, Mary Poppins ch. 9, activism, and Animal Farm – he went not to Rutgers but U. Penn., where he won prizes in fencing. He bested often.
In Man of Two Worlds Julie Schwartz, his agent in the 1940s, credits him as author of “In brightest day, in blackest night, no evil shall escape my sight. Let those who worship evil’s might beware my power – Green Lantern’s light!” He wrote for The Phantom and Mandrake the Magician while Lee Falk served in the war; on radio, for Nick Carter and The Shadow; television, shows that starred Fred Astaire, Julie Harris; he edited Holiday.
His first novel The Demolished Man won the first Best-Novel Hugo Award. The Stars My Destination, even better, as it should be, had no Hugo in its category at the 1957 Worldcon, perhaps for the best, we thus not having to vote between it and Clarke’s City and the Stars, the parallels between which, the books being so different, are so remarkable.
“Fondly Fahrenheit”, perhaps his best novelette, called by Robert Silverberg a paragon of construction and style, he adapted for TV in 1959, beaten for Best Dramatic Presentation only by The Twilight Zone. At short-story length he may never have surpassed “The Pi Man”, coruscating, gripping, strange; he should never have revised it years later. It was beaten for the Hugo only by Keyes’ “Flowers for Algernon” – which its author should never have revised – in both cases unlike The City and the Stars.
He was a member of the Philomathean Society, whose motto Sic itur ad astra (Latin, “Thus we travel to the stars”) closed the most recent Phantom adventure two weeks ago, perhaps in centenary salute.
By James H. Burns: A thought occurred to me just a short while ago, as I was folding some shirts…
How do super heroes do their laundry?
If one’s living at Avengers mansion, presumably there’s no problem. And elsewhere in the Marvel Universe, Reed Richards, I believe, rather famously created clothing consisting of unstable molecules, which have all sorts of uses (as well as, apparently, keeping an outfit pressed and free from soot!)
One would have to presume that Batman has all of these things taken care of neatly by Alfred, and I seem to recall that, in at least the original renditions, Superman wore a uniform made out of the blanket the Kents found him swaddled in, within his Kryptonian rocket. (Ma Kent, evidently, used sewing needles made from shards of the ship…)
But what if one isn’t as well connected, or doubly blessed?
It’s not as though one of the lesser known super-joes can just walk over to the dry cleaner, or even the local laundromat…
Do some of our favorite crimefighters, and galaxy busters, really have to stand over the sink, bottle of Woolite at hand, as they now fight grime…?
One of the few places Saving Mr. Banks is getting negative buzz is in Harlan Ellison’s living room. Because, says he, somebody’s got to tell the truth.
It’s not that the movie lacks entertainment value. Despite pronouncing the title like he’s spitting out the taste of corked wine, Harlan says the movie’s well-made and Emma Thompson’s performance breathtaking – “She blows everybody off the screen.”
What he dislikes is that it’s just a “refurbishing of Walt Disney’s godlike image that he spent his entire life creating” and that “The movie is bullshit from one end to the other.” Because no matter what it says on the screen about the adaptation of her novel Mary Poppins, “P.L. Travers went to her grave despising the movie.”
He also defends Travers from any implied criticism about holding Disney at bay for 20 years before selling the rights by reminding listeners about his own history of defending his work against misinterpretation by studios and producers. (And unmentioned here, in some of the worst cases assigning his screen credit to Cordwainer Bird.)
Photos of (1) George Clayton Johnson and (2) Dennis Etchison posing with George on the sidewalk outside Mystery & Imagination Bookshop in Glendale, Ca.
By James H. Burns: A possibly interesting question for File 770 readers occurred to me over the weekend: In CLASSIC “Doctor Who” do we ever see the Doctor cry?
One pal remembered Hartnell coming close, and I seem to have in my cranium an image of Jon Pertwee becoming a bit choked up…
I’m not sure about Romana or any of the other Gallifreyans, but is it possible –Time Lords don’t have tear ducts?
