Asimov Still Holds The Record

Posted on May 19, 2014 by Mike Glyer

This weekend’s Nebula ceremony kerfuffle sent ripples in all directions. Even though SFWA President Steven Gould resolved it within hours, on Facebook a few hours is the internet equivalent of dog years, more than enough time for people to replay every gaffe and grievance that ever happened at a Nebula Weekend.

However, nothing can rival Isaac Asimov’s ghastly mistake at the 1971 Nebula Awards ceremony. Nor has any other gaffe worked out better for the injured party in the long run.

On Saturday, April 3, 1971 the leading science fiction professionals were seated around banquet tables in New York’s Les Champs Restaurant watching Asimov hand out the Nebulas.

Asimov had been pressed into service at the last minute. While that was not a problem for anyone who loved an audience as much as the Good Doctor, it meant that he had little time to study the handwritten list of results. In those days the emcee was not only given the names of the winners, but the names of the runners-up, which he also announced.

When Asimov came to the Short Story category his eyes slipped over “No Award” and he read the first real name on the list — which was Gene Wolfe, author of “The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories.”

As Wolfe stood up a SFWA officer promptly whispered a correction to Asimov. Asimov went pale and announced he’d made an error. There was “No Award” in the Short Story category. Wolfe sat back down.

Eyewitness Harlan Ellison (writing in Again Dangeous Visions) says everyone felt awful –

Around him everyone felt the rollercoaster nausea of stomachs dropping out of backsides. Had it been me, I would have fainted or screamed or punched Norbert Slepyan of Scribner’s, who was sitting next to me. Gene Wolfe just smiled faintly and tried to make us all feel at ease by a shrug and a gentle nod of his head.

Fortunately, the mistake was eventually redeemed. As the author explained:

A month or so after the banquet I was talking to Joe Hensley, and he joked that I should write “The Death of Doctor Island,” saying that everyone felt so sorry for me that it was sure to win. I thought about that when I got home and decided to try, turning things inside out to achieve a different story.

He did, and his novella “The Death of Doctor Island” won a Nebula in 1974.

Wolfe adds:

After that a hundred readers or so challenged me to write “The Doctor of Death Island.”

Which he also did. The story appeared in Immortal, Jack Dann’s 1978 anthology. (Though no Nebula that year.)

Before long these stories were gathered in The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories and Other Stories (1980), that delightfully-named collection of Wolfe’s best short fiction.

Nor was he done. Gene Wolfe would write a fourth iteration – “Death of the Island Doctor” – to be packaged with the previous “Island” stories for a specialty edition, The Wolfe Archipelago (1983).

In the end, oyster-like, Gene took a little irritant and turned it into a string of pearls…

Michael Sinclair Passes Away

Posted on March 19, 2014 by Mike Glyer

Louisville fan Michael Sinclair died March 14 after a long decline. His wife of 26 years, Christa Cook-Sinclair and son, Alex, were with him at the end.

Michael Sinclair under attack by Godzilla.

Sinclair was an avid science fiction reader who got his first taste of fandom at the original RiverCon in 1975, having found out about it from an article in a Louisville paper. That weekend he met John Guidry for the first time – future chair of the 1988 New Orleans Worldcon won in large measure by Sinclair’s efforts as bid party host.

In Sinclair’s fannish memoir at The Thunder Child he claimed to have become involved working conventions as a result of a loc he wrote to File 770 after the 1979 NASFiC:

File 770 (Mike Glyer’s science fiction fan newzine, reporting on fanzines, sf clubs, conventions, fan funds and fanac) [was] whining about something. I think it had to do with [a fan] huckstering out of his hotel room. In any event, I wrote a rebuttal letter to File 770, saying, “The last thing the fannish world needs is either a Con run by or and or/criticized by lawyers.” Cliff Amos saw the letter and called me up to ask if I wanted to work on RiverCon. I said I would like to work on the film program, but would like to have a budget and not depend on library flicks.

Sinclair surely knew the chuckle this would bring from the many friends he made hosting the string of Hurricane-themed bid parties that brought the 1988 Worldcon to New Orleans – a committee chaired by lawyer John Guidry, and with three more lawyers in the leadership.

The New Orleans in 1988 bidders bankrolled the travel of the charismatic Sinclair all over the country to host room parties where he could dispense Southern charm and hospitality, and French Quarter well drinks. He greeted everyone, “Here, have a Hurricane!” and handed them a potent cup of vodka, rum, and fruit juices, mixed with enough grenadine to turn it fire engine red. This was extremely popular.

The Worldcon bidding system is in large measure a test to destruction. Fans want there to be lots of great bid parties anyway, but implicit in that demand is a test of the bid committee’s creative and logistical competence. Unless a group can put together a string of good bid parties, the thinking goes, you can rule out any chance of them coping with the challenge of an actual Worldcon.

So as an audition for a New Orleans Worldcon, Sinclair’s parties led to a ballot box triumph over three competing bids.

However, Sinclair had never intended to be part of running the Worldcon. Once New Orleans won he was done. Ever since then fandom has made sure to ask whether the folks running the impressive parties are the same ones who’ll be running the con.

Say Da to Moscow bid passport.

Before long the Sinclairs found they missed the fun of those bid parties. Casting about for inspiration, Christa and Mike created a “Say Da to Moscow” Worldcon bid. Because their idea germinated in 1989, two years before the Soviet Union fell apart, they didn’t have to worry about winning, only about having a good time. The bid theme was a satirical play on the idioms and symbols of the USSR’s Communist Party. Led by “Mikhail Sinclair,” Party Theoretician and General Secretary, the bid’s Central Committee included the late Bruce Pelz, Hotel Liaison; Tony Ubelhor, Minister of Propaganda; Maureen Dorris, Minister of Defensive Camouflage; Jack Reed, Chronicler Emeritus; and miscellaneous Party Members and agents.

Bid parties were paid for by the sale of $5 presupports, which came with a convincing looking passport with all kinds of stuff in Cyrillic lettering.

Christa and Mike soon shelved the party scene as their son Alexander came along in 1990.

The family’s memorial plans are still to be made but, as Mike wished, he will be remembered with a wake later this year at Midwestcon.

Alan Rodgers Photos

Posted on March 11, 2014 by Mike Glyer

By Andrew Porter: The photos of Alan Rodgers I’ve seen attached to his obituaries bear little relation to the author I knew in NYC in the 1980s. So, here’s my photo of Alan, upon winning his Bram Stoker Award for 1987’s “The Boy Who Came Back from the Dead”, plus another, from 1990.

Alan Rodgers in 1987. Photo by and copyright © Andrew Porter.

Alan Rodgers in 1990.Photo by and copyright © Andrew Porter.

Starlog Magazine Free Online

Posted on February 26, 2014 by Mike Glyer

Now you can read Starlog for free over at the Internet Archive. The magazine began in 1976 and its heyday was in the 1980s although it continued to appear until about five or six years ago.

I egoscanned the site and – hooray – found two pieces of mine Starlog published once upon a time.

In Issue #110 is my quiz “No Trivial Pursuit: The Hugo Awards” (page 19). Despite so many of the answers being obsolete it’s still a fun read.

And my Science Fiction Clubs list was serialized over six issues, #122, #124, #125, #126, #127 and #128. Mainly of interest if you are looking for your name in print. (This was definitely the peak of Baby Boomer generation fandom. How sobering to realize just 10 years later I was writing “Is Your Club Dead Yet?”)

[Via Robert Sawyer and io9.]

Kickstarter Funds Comic-Con Book

Posted on February 24, 2014 by Mike Glyer

Alan Moore and Jack Kirby in 1985.

Jackie Estrada needed $18,000 of pledges to publish Comic Book People, a hardcover photo tribute to 40 years of Comic-Con. Her Kickstarter appeal was a complete success – by yesterday she’d received $28,360 in pledges from 438 backers.

Estrada has been taking photos at comic book conventions for decades. Comic Book People will publish 600 shots of comic creators and other notables from the 1970s and 1980s. Most will be in black-and-white, but there will be a 16 page color section.

Here are just a few of the people she plans to include:

Golden and Silver Age greats like Jerry Siegel, Joe Shuster, Jack Kirby, Stan Lee, Will Eisner, Carl Barks, Bob Kane, Harvey Kurtzman, C. C. Beck, Murphy Anderson, Jules Feiffer, Gardner Fox, L. B. Cole, Alex Schomburg, Mike Sekowsky, Curt Swan, Jack Katz, Joe Kubert, John Romita, Alex Toth, Al Williamson, Bill Woggon, [and] Wally Wood…

SF & fantasy authors, such as the great Ray Bradbury, Robert Heinlein, Harlan Ellison, Leigh Brackett, George R. R. Martin, Theodore Sturgeon, Clive Barker, Douglas Adams, Larry Niven, Walter Gibson, Jerry Pournelle, and many more…

Her goal is to have the 160-page book ready for Comic-Con this July.

Happy Birthday Dave Kyle

Posted on February 14, 2014 by Mike Glyer

Dave Kyle

The legendary Dave Kyle is 95 today. History has been kind to him for the same reason as Churchill – because he has written it (mostly for Mimosa.)

One cannot fail to be impressed by the realization that a fanpolitician who has been in as much mischief as Dave nevertheless was made a Knight of The Order of Saint Fantony, won the Big Heart Award, and became Worldcon fan guest of honor (1983).

What mischief is that? Here are a few examples —

He attended the 1936 meeting of New York and Philly fans which decided to dub itself the first science fiction convention in advance of the Leeds event announced for 1937.

He wrote the “Yellow Pamphlet” that helped inspire the “The Great Exclusion Act of 1939” but, unlike his fellow Futurians, was not kicked out of the First Worldcon. As Joe Siclari explains —

Some bitter feuding between the Moskowitz-led convention leadership and the New York Futurian group led by Donald A. Wollheim, who had originally been tasked with running the convention. This erupted in an argument at the convention which led to the first great “Exclusion Act.” Wollheim, Fred Pohl, John Michel, Robert W. Lowndes, Cyril Kornbluth, and Jack Gillespie were ejected from the convention for distributing a brochure titled: A Warning. The booklet had been published by Kyle. He told me he stashed the copies behind a radiator where Michel found them. Michel and the other Futurians were giving it out when Moskowitz and Sykora found out about it and banned them from the convention. Meanwhile, Kyle was inside, blissfully attending the proceedings.

Arthur C. Clarke receives Hugo Award from chairman Dave Kyle at the 1956 Worldcon, NyCon II.

In 1956 when Kyle got to chair a Worldcon he enhanced his legend by awarding Hugos made with Oldsmobile hood ornaments, and having banquet speech freeloaders run off with the ever-after famous message “Dave Kyle says you can’t sit here.”

At about the same time he also got involved as a director of WSFS Inc. In the falling-out among its founders Kyle sued some of the others for damage to his reputation.

Yet time does heal all wounds. Three decades later Dave’s reputation was greater than it had ever been – to the degree that in 1985 Starlog Magazine listed him among the 100 Most Important People in Science Fiction/Fantasy alongside Heinlein, Tolkien, Shatner and Nimoy.

Well, there’s greatness and then there’s greatness…

Doris Lessing (1919-2013)

Posted on November 17, 2013 by Mike Glyer

Doris Lessing passed away at home November 17. She was 94. Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, she was also a past Worldcon guest of honor, at Brighton in 1987.

Lessing authored more than 50 novels. Beginning with Briefing for a Descent into Hell (1971), she began to write what she called “inner-space fiction.” Then, in the novel series Canopus in Argos: Archives (vol. 1–5, 1979–1984) Lessing wrote about the post-atomic war development of the human species.

“Lessing’s central sf achievement, the Canopus in Argos: Archives sequence places the crises of human self-striving – and the crises facing the planet of our birth – into a metaphysically conceived interstellar frame,” John Clute wrote in the Science Fiction Encyclopedia. “Everywhere the drive – sometimes thwarted – is towards literal union with universal principles (or God). The series exudes, at times, a piety not normally associated with sf; but at others the perspectives it opens are illuminating. In Lessing’s hands, the instruments of sf become parables: lessons in finding paths that may lead us out of the sour muddle of unenlightened worlds.”

When Lessing was awarded the 2007 Nobel Prize for Literature, the citation called her “that epicist of the female experience, who with scepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilisation to scrutiny.”

Not that she was impressed. She told the reporters who brought her the news, “Oh Christ, I couldn’t care less.” (Which may have been the very same thing Chesley Bonestell said about a Special Hugo Award he was given in 1974, before relegating it to his bathroom to sit on the lid of the toilet tank.)

Nor did that mean the literary world had finally relaxed its prejudices against the SF genre. Critic Harold Bloom belittled her selection for the Nobel Prize to a wire service reporter: “Although Ms. Lessing at the beginning of her writing career had a few admirable qualities, I find her work for the past 15 years quite unreadable … fourth-rate science fiction.”

In 1999 the Queen appointed Lessing a Companion of Honour, an exclusive order for those who have done “conspicuous national service.” She’d previously turned down the offer of becoming a Dame of the British Empire “because there is no British Empire.” Being a Companion of Honour, she explained, means “you’re not called anything – and it’s not demanding. I like that.” Being a Dame was “a bit pantomime.”

The text of her Conspiracy GoH speech is available in Worldcon Guest of Honor Speeches, edited by Resnick and Siclari. She also wrote a sidebar for the 1987 Worldcon souvenir book about how watching a TV documentary about nudism led her to think about the original creation of clothing, culture – and science fiction stories. It closed with an example of one of these ur-stories.

The storyteller said, “People, listen. One night the bravest young man of the tribe summoned Heru the owl and said, ‘Take me up on your back and fly with me to that floating ghost up there, just above the trees – quick, before it crosses the sky and goes down over the mountains. I want to ask it some questions. I want to say “Who are your people who grow slowly fat and then grow slowly thin? Where do you live? Why do you send one of you every night over our valley to watch us? We want to know who you are, what you are…’

“Very well, says Heru, I’ll take you but what will you give me in exchange?

“I’ll tell you a story as I sit on your back and we fly together, will that do?

“That will do, says Heru, and the brave young man climbs on his back and….”

Photos of 1981 NYC Party for James White

Posted on November 14, 2013 by Mike Glyer

Peter de Jong recently found a set of 27 photos taken at a 1981 party for LunaCon GoH James White, the Irish sf writer, and has posted them here.

The party, organized by Moshe Feder, was held at de Jong’s apartment in midtown Manhattan. Feder says he does not know who took the pictures.

James White wears his famous Saint Fantony blazer in photo #1.

Fans identified in the photographs are: Norma Auer Adams, Larry Carmody, Ross Chamberlain, Alina Chu, Eli Cohen, Genny Dazzo, Peter de Jong, Moshe Feder, Chip Hitchcock, Lenny Kaye, Hope Leibowitz, Craig Miller, Andrew Porter, Stu Shiffman, James White, Jonathan White, Peggy White, and Ben Yalow.

(There is also an unnamed fan in photo #4 I recognize. She occasionally looks at this blog and I will happily add her name to this article if she grants permission.)

[Thanks to Moshe Feder and Andrew Porter for the story.]

Delphyne Joan Hanke-Woods (1945-2013)

Posted on September 21, 2013 by Mike Glyer

Joan Hanke-Woods. Copyright © 2013 Andrew I. Porter; all rights reserved.

Award-winning artist Joan Hanke-Woods, also known as Delphyne Woods, died of unknown causes in early September reports SF Site News. She was 67.

“In 1949 my paternal grandfather taught me to read using his son’s science fiction pulp magazines stored in the attic of the family bungalow in Chicago’s Ravenswood neighborhood,” she said in her artist’s bio for Chicon 7.

She discovered sf fandom at Windycon in 1978 and soon became one of the leading fanartists, sending portfolios of her photocopied work to several editors at a time. File 770 ran quite a few of her full-page illustrations as covers. She created the centerpiece/centerfold and other art for Bill Bowers’ live performance Outworlds 50 in 1987.

Hanke-Woods won the Fanzine Activity Achievement Awards (FAAns) Best Serious Artist category in 1979 and 1980. After being nominated six times for the Best Fan Artist Hugo, she finally won in 1986, her last year on the ballot. Then she gafiated. But just recently she became active in fandom again.

While providing art for fanzines, she was also making sales to prozines and book publishers. Her art appeared in Galaxy, Fantastic Films, and The Comics Journal and in books by R.A. Lafferty and Joan D. Vinge.

She was Fan Guest of Honor at the 1984 WindyCon in Chicago.

Delphyne Woods. From Chicon 7 website.

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

Dan McCarthy (1934-2013)

Posted on September 15, 2013 by Mike Glyer

Dan McCarthy, the grand old man of New Zealand fandom, died August 7. He was a past Fan Guest of Honour at the New Zealand national convention and a 2009 nominee for the Sir Julius Vogel Award.

McCarthy belonged to Aotearapa for 25 years. He was the apa’s official editor from 1986-1987 and 2001-2003. As a member he contributed 77 issues of his fanzine Panopticon for which he did paintings and colour graphics. McCarthy’s skills as a fanartist were widely appreciated. He won the Best Fan Artist category of the New Zealand Science Fiction Fan Awards in 1989 and 1991.

[Thanks to Bruce Gillespie for the story.]

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