Dirda Reviews Ballard Collection
in Washington Post

Ballard once said, “The only truly alien planet is Earth,” recalls Michael Dirda in his review of The Complete Stories of J.G. Ballard for the Washington Post.

Dirda sees parallels between Ballard and Philip K. Dick: many would agree. What’s surprising is his description of the contrasts in their work:

…Dick’s work is fundamentally sociable, a paean to unacknowledged goodness and the quiet satisfactions of ordinary life. Ballard’s protagonists tend to be isolated visionaries who inexorably pursue their obsessions to the point of madness or death, typically reaching self-fulfillment through nothing less than self-immolation.

By Michael Dirda’s lights, Phil Dick’s worldview sounds practically Hobbit-esque. But I don’t see Ragle Gumm or Frank Frink adjourning to the Prancing Pony for a jolly tankard of ale.

[Thanks to Andrew Porter for the link.]

Hand-to-Hand Selling

Francis Hamit, in “Street Level Views of Book Marketing” at SelfPublishingReview.com, uses stories from his latest Shenandoah Spy book tour to teach that if you want to get paid to write, then you have to get out there and sell:  

I engage most of [the customers at my book signings] with a friendly greeting and a pitch line. This is something I learned in 1988, the year I was a Factory Representative for the Hoover Company, working in department stores. Most people did not come in to buy a vacuum cleaner, and most are not at a signing specifically to buy your book, no matter how much advance publicity you have done. Most have never heard of you or your book. You have to introduce yourself, and even if you don’t close right then, have a bookmark or other sales tool to hand them. It’s not the books you sell that day but the number you sell afterward that really counts and keeps your book on the shelves.

Roddenberry’s Mac Goes to Auction

First Apple Macintosh Plus, given to Gene Roddenberry

First Apple Macintosh Plus, given to Gene Roddenberry

Profiles in History, which auctioned Forry Ackerman’s stuff earlier this year, will soon be taking bids on another item with fan appeal — a computer (serial number F4200NUM0001), given by Apple Computer, Inc. to Gene Roddenberry. It comes with a letter of authentication from Roddenberry’s son.

Some of you remember, I’m sure, that when the Macintosh Plus came on the market in 1986 it boasted an awesome 1 megabyte of RAM (upgradeable to 4Mb), supported the double-sided floppy disk format, and was the first Mac with a SCSI port for fast data transfer to and from an external hard drive.

The reason you remember is that you are still paying off the credit card you smoked to buy your own Mac Plus.

The full text of the press release follows the jump.

Update 09/18/2009: The publicist for Profiles in History forwarded a corrected press release after it was pointed out that the computer couldn’t have been the first Mac Plus. The replacement text now appears after the jump. He explains: “Firstly, this Macintosh was, indeed, presented to Gene Roddenberry by Apple. There is no doubt about this. The conflict between the photo and the serial number is as follows. This computer, given by Apple to Mr. Roddenberry, is an early production Macintosh 128 (#776), which was then upgraded by Apple for Gene to a Macintosh Plus-thus the model number / serial number / panel that “belongs to” a Macintosh Plus. The 0001 led us to mistakenly believe that it was the first one off the line.” 

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Don’t Put That Bear
Where There’s No Air

Space walking bears

Space walking bears

British teddy bears strapped to a helium weather balloon reached the edge of space, an altitude of 100,000 feet, daring the nearly airless night in tiny spacesuits made by school children.

After rising to an altitude of around 100,000ft, a webcam caught their ‘space-walk’ for posterity before the helium balloon burst.

They then fell to Earth before a parachute opened automatically to provide a soft landing.

During the 2 hour 9 minute flight the radio on board broadcast the location of the craft to a chase team on the ground…

They landed just 50 miles from their launch pad by Churchill College in Cambridge.

My 7-year-old Sierra is quite interested in science, but if she was involved in this project I know she’d worry about the teddies. This crew met a happy ending, but that isn’t always the case:

During ten previous experiments, half have ended up ditching in the North Sea. One disappeared over Scandinavia before washing up on the coast of Denmark.

Sierra definitely would not like that.

[Thanks to David Klaus for the story.]

Steve Vertlieb on Twilight Zone

Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone aired for the first time on October 2, 1959. Steve Vertlieb, the Thunder Child, celebrates the show’s 50th anniversary in his essay “An Element of Time”, by telling the fascinating story of how the show succeeded despite the mundane tastes of CBS executives, and became an icon of early television:

There is an obscure Air Force term relating to a moment when a plane is coming down on approach and a pilot cannot see the horizon. It’s called the Twilight Zone. …

Rod Serling had penned several landmark teleplays for The Columbia Broadcasting System, including Patterns, and Requiem For A Heavyweight, but the perils of network censorship were beginning to take a toll on the idealistic author. As his artistic voice and moral integrity became increasingly challenged by network cowardice, Serling found his search for lost horizons alarmingly elusive.

(Vertlieb would like it noted that his essay has been posted simultaneously at Roger Hall’s Film Music Review.)

 [Thanks to Steve Vertlieb and John King Tarpinian for the links.]

Gagging on Google

It wasn’t so long ago that people’s only thought after seeing the Google name was “There’s a company with a fabulous search engine.” Period.

A little later, people envied the fun Google employees had thinking up more cool ways to organize and distribute information. Like digitizing all the books in the world. Or photographing all the streets in the world.

But once Google actually did these projects, fun wasn’t the first word to come to people’s minds.

Instead, it was “Lawsuit,” or the latest controversy over the Google Book Search Settlement.

And “Spies.” In a small English town a photographer for Google Street View was suspected of having exactly the same kind of “fun” enjoyed by agents of the KGB, according to a story in the Los Angeles Times:

The good folk of Broughton don’t take kindly to being photographed without permission. Just ask Google.

When the search-engine giant sent one of its specially equipped cars to take pictures of the village for its Street View feature, residents swung into action. They stopped the car in its tracks, called the police and quizzed the bewildered driver for nearly two hours before letting him go.

Many Swiss have complained too. No wonder:

In one image, a married Swiss politician was photographed with a blond who was not his wife, which forced him to explain publicly that the woman was his secretary. In another case, a Street View image was reprinted in a newspaper, and “as a result, a restaurant owner had to explain how he was photographed in a known drug-dealing area,” said [Hanspeter Thuer, the Swiss federal data-protection commissioner].

The way Google has handled this inevitably makes it sound quite sinister. Yet if Google handled things a bit differently I bet the tide would turn in its favor.

What if, instead of surreptitiously driving through towns taking photographs, Google Street View advertised its route in advance? People endure all kinds of abuse on reality shows so they can say “Hey Ma, I’m on TV!” Allow people to snatch a little piece of fame with no more inconvenience than standing in their front yard at a certain time and the number who’ll be pleased by the arrangement will swamp the few who object — particularly because anyone who is someplace he shouldn’t be will be warned to duck out of sight when the camera rolls by.

Vonda McIntyre’s Superluminal at BookViewCafe

Hugo and Nebula-award winning author Vonda N. McIntyre has released her novel Superluminal as an ebook at BookViewCafe.com. Read it free as a serial, one chapter per week, or buy the complete novel as a downloadable ebook for $4.99.

Superluminal was originally published in 1983 by Houghton Mifflin.

Other titles from McIntyre available at BookViewCafe.com include the award-winning Dreamsnake and The Moon and the Sun, as well as a number of her short stories.

Still Celebrating Ray

 Gene Beley, robot and Ray Bradbury

Gene Beley and Ray Bradbury pose with a show robot built by Gene in 1979. The photo was probably taken not long after the robot was built.

Gene Beley attended Ray Bradbury’s 89th birthday party, celebrated at Mystery and Imagination Bookstore on August 22, and wrote about it in an article that’s just been published in the Stockton (CA) Record. Gene believes in the message Ray has consistently delivered to audiences throughout the years:  

He preached that the secret to life was finding that lifetime love in a spouse and occupation – something to jump out of bed each morning and be excited about doing.

“If you haven’t found it yet, by God, keep trying until you find it!” he’d yell at college students. Today, he keeps repeating, “It’s all about love.” That love has been returned many fold from students who have since become film producers, writers and directors. Some have even hired Bradbury, or collaborated with him on projects.

I feel lucky to be in that club, having met Ray in 1968 when I was a young reporter for the Ventura Star-Free Press, and I published a biography about him in 2006, Ray Bradbury Uncensored.

[Thanks to John King Tarpinian for the story.]

Halloween the 13th, Part 1965

With any luck, LASFS will never celebrate another Halloween the way it did in 1965. An assailant outside the building fired three shots into the party. No one was struck by the bullets, but Dian Crayne was cut by flying debris. She writes:

Yes, I remember that incident VERY well. Bill Rotsler and I were sitting in a window seat, talking, and the bullet went between us. I had wood splinters in my cheek, Bill remarked later that he thought momentarily that for some reason one of my earrings had exploded. (He used to say later on that we had been “under fire together.”) Of course, everyone in the room hit the deck, and I remember calling out to Bruce [Pelz], “Don’t get excited, but I think I’ve been hit.” Only splinters, though.

[At the time] I was pregnant with Cecy and she was born in March of 1966.

As for the location, it was wherever Don Simpson and his house mates were living at the time. Don dug the bullet out of the woodwork and I talked him into giving it to me. Alas, I lost it during one of our moves.

The surmise was that the shooter was one of a small group of people who had tried party-crashing earlier in the evening and been ejected. The police came and took statements, but no one was ever picked up for it.

LASFS Website Posts Moffatt Photos

Rick Sneary, Roy Tackett, Takumi Shibano, Sachiko Shibano 

Above: Rick Sneary, Roy Tackett, Takumi Shibano and Sachiko Shibano enjoying the 1968 Worldcon.

The Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society website now boasts dozens of fanhistorically important photos from the collection of Len and June Moffatt. What a trip in the Wayback Machine!

These photos from the end of the Sixties are a window into cons and events people were still talking about when I joined LASFS in 1970. Some are pictures of fans who made themselves unforgettable in ways good and bad but I only heard about because they vanished from the club before I arrived.

For example, they were still taking about the club’s  1965 Halloween Party. Not that you’d know it from the pictures, but this infamous party was interrupted by gunshots fired from outside into the building. Dian Pelz (later Crayne) was slightly hurt by flying wood splinters. One bullet passed between Dian and Bill Rotsler as they sat talking. A possible cause is that two crashers had been evicted from the party earlier in the evening. Police came and took down information, but no arrests ever made.

Here you can see the highlights of FunCon I in 1968 (which I recently mentioned in co-chair Chuck Crayne’s obituary.) They include a rare photo of Flieg Hollander, whose claim to fame includes mathematically proving Larry Niven’s Ringworld is unstable (the launching point for a sequel).

And there are a lot of interesting photos of well-known fans from back in the day. He’s a fannish legend, but have you ever seen a picture of the late Elmer Perdue? Or Locus’ Charles N. Brown, Marsha Elkin Brown and Elliott Shorter in their prime?

Here’s a photo of Ray Bradbury talking to Leigh Brackett.

And this is probably the fuzziest, pinkest photo ever taken of Fuzzy Pink Niven.

There are shots of fans paying tribute to Star Trek at the 1966 Worldcon (Tricon), and of William Shatner mingling.

There are photos from any number of Westercons: the 1965 Westercon, 1966 Westercon, 1967 Westercon, 1969 Westercon, 1970 Westercon, and 1972 Westercon. Why no pictures from a 1968 Westercon? Because after winning their 1968 Westercon bid the same group successfully bid for the Worldcon and held a single con to satisfy both, BayCon, the 1968 Worldcon. From that Worldcon: Void Boys Ted White and Greg Benford;  Bob Bloch, Betty Farmer, and John W. Campbell, Jr. having cocktails; and from the masquerade, Cory Seidman (later Panshin) as a Corflu Bottle

There are quite a few pictures documenting the LASFS’ efforts to buy its first clubhouse. Bruce Pelz led the LASFS to reorganize as a nonprofit corporation as a step in acquiring a clubhouse. These pictures were taken at the first LASFS Board of Directors Meeting in 1972, held in Milt Stevens’ apartment. (I was there!)

LASFS bought its first clubhouse the following year, a property on Ventura Boulevard. Most of these shots are of fans refurbishing it.

[Thanks to Lee Gold for the story.]