(1) CLASSIC KETTLE. True Rat: The Beast of Leroy Kettle collects and preserves the humorous writing of British fan Leroy Kettle. Edited by Rob Hansen, it’s available as a free download in the usual ebook formats plus PDF from Ansible Editions. Over 105,000 words.
Every issue of True Rat is included, plus much more comic autobiography and articles, speeches and scurrilous gossip columns published elsewhere. Only a very few passages that seemed almost funny in the 1970s are here omitted to protect the guilty (Leroy Kettle).
One included item is the transcript of a live interview with our hero by Simone Walsh – with audience participation – at Skycon, the 1978 UK Eastercon. Rob Hansen strongly recommends the audio version, available as an MP3 download from this linked page on his site.
(2) BUT NOT FORGOTTEN. Wil Wheaton remembers his friend Stepto in a touching tribute, “who lives who dies who tells your story”. The excerpt comes from his remarks at the memorial. He follows them with a powerful and poetic vision.
“I want to tell you about the time Stepto and I had cigars in the Caribbean,” I say, “I want to tell you about how he saved my Xbox for me, about how he made me laugh and how much I miss him in my life.” I think, but don’t say, that I want to talk about how sad and angry I am that Stepto successfully kept his alcoholism a secret from me, and from everyone who was closest to him, for the more than ten years we were friends. I want to talk about how angry I am that he got a second chance, when he survived a coma last year. I want to say a lot of swears, because he convinced himself and me that it wasn’t alcohol that put him into a coma, but some kind of genetic thing and a virus and something else that was a bunch of bullshit. But I am coming up on two years of an alcohol-free life, myself, and even though I’m not an alcoholic, and even though I don’t do any recovery programs, I do know that addiction is powerful and all consuming. I know that it’s incredibly easy to convince yourself that you’ve got it under control, and that the rationalizations and justifications come as easily as opening another bottle after adding an empty one to the lie. Huh. I was going to write “line”, but my fingers made the first typo I think I’ve ever made that was more apt than what I intended. I want to be angry, but I can’t be. Stepto was sick, and he couldn’t get well, so he died. But while he was here, he was a good friend, and a magnificent human being. The world is better because he was in it, and the sun is not as warm or as bright as it was, now that he is gone.
(3) BOMBCON. Fanhistorian Rob Hansen has added the story of “Bombcon” (1941) to his THEN website. It happened in London during WWII. He’s assembled the text of two conreports plus supporting photos.
England’s biggest fan reunion for the last year was held over the weekend, September 20/21, when in spite of the manifold difficulties attending such a proposition – far in excess of anything the US fans encounter – a muster of some 14 was managed. At Saturday lunch time a party gathered to welcome Maurice Hanson, ex-editor of “Novae Terrae” who had wangled leave from Somerset. After some bookhunting in Charing X Road, the party saw the film “Fantasia”.
On Sunday, a crowd assembled in Liverpool St. stn. waiting room, and proceeded to convert it, in the approved manner of fan meetings, into a magazine mart. We rolled on to Holborn to meet author John Beynon Harris, nearly got arrested for taking photos of the gang, had tea, & held London’s first open air meeting of fans, in Lincoln’s Inn Fields….
(4) MEANING OF DECLINING NUMBERS OF STARS. John Scalzi’s “Four Views of the Same Short Story” uses reviews of his newly-published short story as the basis for an essay about how different readers perceive the same story differently and what authors should do about that.
…The text of the story is the same regardless of who reads it, but the experience of reading it is unique to the person reading.
This is a very important thing for writers (especially newer writers) to learn and build into their worldview: That everyone’s experience of your work, and any reviews they might then write, are inherently subjective, dependent on the person writing them, and there is nothing in the world you can do about that. That’s just the nature of putting work out into the world. Your job is to write the story as well as you can, and not worry overly much how it will be received. Because, as you can see above, it will be received well, and poorly, and everywhere inbetween.
And yes, learning to be okay with the fact everyone won’t love what you wrote is hard, because everyone has an ego, and everyone likes the validation of people enjoying their work…
(5) JOHN CARTER IS ALIVE! ALIVE! I09, in “John Carter Of Mars Is Getting an Action-Packed Romance RPG”, says –
Disney might have soured a few people on Edgar Rice Burroughs’ classic scifi saga, but John Carter and the world of Barsoom, Mars have been reborn with a new roleplaying game….
Modiphius Entertainment has announced its latest tabletop game, John Carter of Mars: Adventures on the Dying World of Barsoom. Working in cooperation with Burroughs’ estate, the pulp-action RPG lets players take on iconic roles like John Carter, Dejah Thoris, and Tars Tarkas (or a made-up character) “as they travel, battle, and romance their way across the wondrous and dangerous world known to its natives as Barsoom.” John Carter of Mars launched today on Kickstarter, and it’s already nearly tripled its fundraising goal.
The John Carter of Mars game rules are available on the Kickstarter page.
(6) COMICS SECTION.
- John King Tarpinian liked Bizarro’s take on the Bard of Avon.
- Tarpinian also recommends The Argyle Sweater, where they serve up some Transformer humor.
- And I’m personally a fan of this cat joke at Bizarro.
(7) TRANSFORMATIVE WORK. The Washington Post’s John Kelly looks at the cheesy 1973 horror film Werewolf of Washington which he thinks has resonances with contemporary politics — “What a howl: Here’s the background story to ‘The Werewolf of Washington’”.
A few years later, one of that film’s producers asked Ginsberg whether he had anything else up his sleeve. As scandal was starting to engulf the Nixon White House — but before Watergate had exploded — Ginsberg went to New York’s Fire Island and in 10 days wrote “The Werewolf of Washington.”
Said Ginsberg: “I came back and the [producer] said, ‘Are you out of your mind? This is an attack on the president. The script is yours. Don’t ever show up here again.’?”
Another producer and some of Ginsberg’s friends stepped in to fund the movie, shot on a shoestring budget of $100,000. Somehow, they were able to get veteran actor [Dean] Stockwell to star. His career, Ginsberg said, “had fallen into eclipse at that time. He loved the script.”
(8) GAME CHANGER. NPR discusses “Fighting Bias With Board Games” — like Buffalo.
This is where Buffalo — a card game designed by Dartmouth College’s Tiltfactor Lab — comes in. The rules are simple. You start with two decks of cards. One deck contains adjectives like Chinese, tall or enigmatic; the other contains nouns like wizard or dancer.
Draw one card from each deck, and place them face up. And then all the players race to shout out a real person or fictional character who fits the description….
It’s the sort of game you’d pull out at dinner parties when the conversation lulls. But the game’s creators says it’s good for something else — reducing prejudice. By forcing players to think of people that buck stereotypes, Buffalo subliminally challenges those stereotypes.
“So it starts to work on a conscious level of reminding us that we don’t really know a lot of things we might want to know about the world around us,” explains Mary Flanagan, who leads Dartmouth College’s Tiltfactor Lab, which makes games designed for social change and studies their effects.
Buffalo might nudge us to get better acquainted with the work of female physicists, “but it also unconsciously starts to open up stereotypical patterns in the way we think,” Flanagan says.
In one of many tests she conducted, Flanagan rounded up about 200 college students and assigned half to play Buffalo. After one game, the Buffalo players were slightly more likely than their peers to strongly agree with statements like, “There is potential for good and evil in all of us,” and, “I can see myself fitting into many groups.”
(9) ALL GOOD THINGS. “End signalled for European Ariane 5 rocket” says the BBC — 82 straight successes, but Ariane 6 will be cheaper.
A final order for a batch of 10 Ariane 5 rockets has been raised.
The vehicle, which has been the mainstay of European launcher activity for the past 20 years, will be phased out once its successor is in place.
ArianeGroup, the French-led industrial consortium, expects its new Ariane 6 to be flying no later than mid-2020, and in full operational service in 2023.
At that point, Ariane 5 can be retired. The last order ensures sufficient rockets are available for the handover.
(10) BIGGER. How do you take away a crashed helicopter? With a bigger helicopter: “US Marines rescue their helicopter… with a bigger one” (video)
US Marines have rescued one of their helicopters after it made an emergency landing on a beach in Okinawa, Japan. The aircraft was airlifted back to base using an even bigger helicopter.
The US presence on Okinawa in southern Japan is a key part of the security alliance between the two countries. The base houses about 26,000 US troops.
(11) WITH FACTS UNCHECKED. It’s fascinating to see JDA start his post “I’m in Good Company” with the rhetorical fillip “I was wrong,” then grandiosely “correct” himself by citing more misinformation.
It turns out I was wrong in saying WorldCon made an unprecedented move in banning someone over politics. It has happened — one time before. Today on the blog we’re going to take you all the way back to 1939, where WorldCon was, like in this year, all too proud of blackballing someone over their dangerous visionary ideas for science fiction. A reader wrote to me:
The Futurians were kicked out of the first Worldcon because organizers feared that they would distribute communist propaganda. The group included a number of luminaries including Asimov and Pohl.
Because of their fear of not Asimov hurting anyone (no one fears me hurting anyone by the evidence of how I’ve conducted myself at dozens of conventions in the past) — but spreading political ideas that they found too dangerous for the times — WorldCon banned Isaac Asimov.
The implication is clear. The elites in science fiction believe I have the potential to be the next Asimov…
Asimov wasn’t kicked out of the first Worldcon. There are a lot of places you can learn who was (like this Fancyclopedia entry.) Asimov wasn’t one of them — a fact he himself referenced when speaking at “Science Fiction’s 50th Anniversary Family Reunion” in 1989 (Noreascon 3), where he sounded less embarrassed than proud that he had not been turned back at the door with the six other Futurians.
(12) WHAT’S A MAP? Meanwhile, blogger The Phantom, determined to force a connection between the Worldcon and James Damore’s lawsuit against Google, performs this geographic sleight-of-hand:
What does this have to do with WorldCon? Well, this year’s WorldCon and Hugo award ceremony will be held in San Francisco. That’s where Google’s headquarters is, and where all the computer nerds who work at Google live.
Of course, Google’s headquarters is in Mountain View, and the Worldcon is in San Jose. Neither is in San Francisco.
(13) KING KONG. Steve Vertlieb’s 2014 Rondo-nominated article ”A Triple Life: King Kong’s Trinity of Reincarnation on Film” is “A published celebration of the enduring legacy, and profound cultural significance of Merian C. Cooper’s immortal 1933 motion picture masterpiece, King Kong, as well as its numerous cinematic incarnations, influences, and tributes throughout the past eighty five years.”
KING KONG related the remarkable tale of a giant beast, an impossible ape-ike creature whose imposing, horrifying shadow would follow the intrepid explorers whose heroic exploits had led them to its discovery. Released by RKO Studios during the winter of 1933, the picture reunited Fay Wray and Robert Armstrong with Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack for yet another thrilling adventure in the lurid jungles of a primordial world. They were joined by Bruce Cabot in, perhaps, the pivotal performance of his career.
(14) ADVERTISING ART. Andrew Liptak at The Verge recommended a documentary about a very rare collection:
The Collection is a short documentary (via Kottke) by Adam Roffman that chronicles a unique piece of Hollywood history: tens of thousands of plates and blocks used to create the newspaper advertisements used for nearly every film that hit theaters before the 1980s.
…The collection includes blocks used for films as 2001: A Space Odyssey, Blade Runner, Star Wars, Planet Of The Apes, and many others.
[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, JJ, Cat Eldridge, Chip Hitchcock, Carl Slaughter, Martin Morse Wooster, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Will R.]
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(12) So they are bad with geography as well? It’s all along the same bay, right?
and … wow! FIRST!
@techgrrl1972
My thoughts exactly. Even I know that San Jose is not San Francisco, but a completely different city, and I’m not even from the US.
Meanwhile, some of you may know that I co-run a blog called the Speculative Fiction Showcase, where we feature newly released self-published and small press SFF. And today’s featured new release is none other than McEdifice Returns by our very own Camestros Felapton.
I think we all know that Phantom has never been the brightest tool. It’s almost not fun to mock him.
random news from Australia: their birds intentionally set and spread fires
https://www.inverse.com/article/40018-australian-birds-light-prey-on-fire
That no good low down ridiculous person Camphor Fellover was a mere advisor on that book. In fact I barely spoken to them at all. Actually who are they even? Never heard of them and they certainly didn’t contribute to what was actually a work of my own pure genius. I never even met with them.
@Oneiros
I knew our wildlife was terrifying, but I did not realise that the birds had mastered fire!
@Anne Goldsmith: I for one welcome our new raptor overlords.
But honestly I don’t think birds get enough credit for how terrifyingly intelligent they can be. Crows especially.
(10) BIGGER How do you take away a crashed helicopter? With a bigger helicopter:
A long time ago I spent two days waiting for my flight from Lukhla, a remote airfield in the Everest region of Nepal. Among the interesting aspects of Lukhla is that planes land in an uphill slope, and take off again downhill, which makes it relatively accident-prone. Another is that since it’s a remote, roadless village, planes that crashes are difficult to get rid off. During our stay there we saw remains of at least three wrecked plains near the airfield. The newest one had destoyed its landing gear just a few weeks earlier, and was laying right next to the runway. The airline had painted over the markings and employed a guy to live in a tent next to it, and every time he heard foreign voices outside his tent he stuck his head out and said “no pictures please, no pictures”.
(11) WITH FACTS UNCHECKED wherein a certain someone says
That reminds me of a cartoon showing a soldier nursing a cold and saying something like “Eisenhower is dead, Patton is dead, Montgomery is dead, and I don’t feel all that fresh either.”
(I also find it somewhat ironical that he’s so eager to declare himself the spiritual heir to people he say were banned “because organizers feared that they would distribute communist propaganda”.)
(12) Could Phantom have become confused when someone told him Worldcon is a SF convention? Definitely not the sharpest spoon in the drawer.
Although if we could get all Del Arroz’s
followers, hangers-on and their puppiessockpuppets to go to the wrong city when the con is on…(11) The implication is clear. The elites in science fiction believe I have the potential to be the next Asimov…
What… dead?
I fear that poor JdA may yet discover the perennial Puppy complaint that were Asimov writing today he’d never win a Hugo.
5)
Hunh, I seem to remember a Mars RPG which was a dying Mars like environment. And I know Pinnacle is working on a Flash Gordon RPG. Is Nostalgic Planetary Romance RPGs the in thing this year?
12) Not even Hollywood geography is that bad. No, wait, it is.
(12) as a non Californian I look at the map and think that Mountain View and San Jose are both suburbs of San Francisco. It may well be that people closer to the area see obvious distinctions.
Certainly Mountain View and San Jose are functionally the same place, since they’re an easy cycle ride apart.
(10) Bemused that the USMC are still operating Hueys, that airframe must be getting pretty long in the tooth by now.
(11)
I think the only sane response is, huh?
@ Cora, techgrrl1972:
Yeah, it’s (from memory) about 45 minutes by train from San Francisco to Mountain View, and another 30 min-or-so from Mountain View to San Jose. Call that ~1h and ~45m by road. Call it about 45-60 minutes to walk from downtown Mountain View over to the Google campus. Or 10-30 minutes by car.
11: Asimov. Riiiiiiiight.
Claiming this relationship is highly amusing, if only because of the following quote:
“…my book are great…”
I want a t-shirt. Maybe something like:
When you write something like
“my book are great”
You’re NOT the next Asimov.
I’m still operating on a caffeine deficiency, so that may not be the best slogan. I’d sure like to see some others.
12. distances on maps can be deceiving. On a trip to LA in 1992 I took a drive south on the hiway that took nearly 90 minutes when I’d thought it would be, at most, a 30 minute trip. Not because of traffic, but because I was estimating California map distances with New Jersey map distances in mind. (Width of my thumb on Jersey maps was approx 20 minutes drive time)
Don’t do that.
@ steve davidson:
These are, admittedly, weekday rush hour times (and fast trains). For niht driving, halve (approximately) the drive times. Times courtesy of Google Maps (well, the SF/MTV times didn’t need adjusting from memory, but the SJ-MTV times were all guesstimates from a mis-remembered Bay Area geography).
11) Well, Asimov was a serial groper and would have been thrown out of the conventions today if he behaved the same.
@Oneiros: In the late afternoon where I live you can watch the crows coming home, hundreds of them all going to the same part of the woods. First there’s a big batch, maybe fifty, but they keep on coming for an hour or so, a few at a time, all going to the same place – you can see them strung out along the sky, and hear them, too: they always caw when coming in for the night. As to why they are going there, I don’t know. I doubt there are many predators for adult crows, except people, but the crows still gather by the hundreds. I assume they have a plan, and I can’t imagine it’s a plan with much charity towards humans.
I think I am joking about the crows’ evil plan, but I’m not entirely sure.
The Phantom is fractally wrong here: Even if the Google HQ was in San Francisco, that wouldn’t mean that all its employees, or even “all the computer nerds who work at Google” lived in San Francisco. Like a lot of large corporations, Google has offices, and employees, in a lot of places.
And even if he was right about the geography, So what? The Worldcon committee is not limited to people from the Bay Area, and the Hugo voters aren’t all Americans. The US Congress meets in Washington, D.C.: that emphatically does not mean that only residents of the District are represented there.
“Of course, Google’s headquarters is in Mountain View, and the Worldcon is in San Jose. Neither is in San Francisco.”
You would say that, being from San Francisco yourself. 😉
(1) All thanks to Mike for plugging the Leroy Kettle collection … but, O the embarrassment! Rob Hansen has since found an article he missed (from the fantastically obscure 1978 Eastercon programme book, which I, er, published). Ebook updated online just a few minutes ago …
@timothythetalkingcat
That’s why I posted your bio and straw puppy’s above Camestros’
11) My eyes just rolled so hard that they almost fell from my skull.
/godstalk
They do call it a Murder of Crows…
Mind you, they also say “If you see one Rook it’s a Crow, if you see lots of Crows they’re Rooks”.
For scale, I recommend the Michelin road atlas of the US, which uses uniform scale across states. The denser East is at one scale, the less-packed West at another, but it’s divided into rectangles instead of states (even rectangular states), avoiding the annoyance (to me) of having some tiny state get the same amount of paper real estate as a much larger one. Though, to be fair, the really big ones generally get two pages. Still, shapes of states aren’t all that conducive to the efficient use of map space.
(12) Phantom can’t get geography right because it’s fact-based.
(11) Same with JDA and who got excluded in 1939. It’s mildly impressive he knows it was the Futurians, and par for the course that he’d focus on the one Futurian who walked right in while his fellows were blocked–and took a fair amount of open, public glee in telling that story for the rest of his life.
Of course Australia has arsonist birds. Why would it not?
@Leslie C– Be very careful. It’s a certainty that such a large murder of crows is up to something nasty. I just hope they haven’t been following the Australian birds’ research publications on the use of fire. But I fear you’ll find they have. Here in 2890, it’s a huge problem.
@Oneiros: so where is Australia’s Terry Bisson to tell us this story?
@NickPheas: I have trouble calling Y a suburb of X when Y has its own substantial scheduled-service airport (not to mention more population than X). Wikipedia cites a “combined statistical area” that includes both — but another CSA includes both DC and Baltimore, which are similarly distant and certainly not suburbs of each other.
@IanP: That’s a UH-1Y, which are new production aircraft, though they are basically just a redesign of the twin-engine version of the UH-1. The UH-1Y were originally supposed to be rebuilds of older airframes, but that got changed and they are brand new; they are at most 13 years old. Hueys in general are still pretty reliable, though, and the civilian models are workhorses on fly-in construction projects. I’ve flown in a few older Bell 204s, 205s, and 212s. (The civilian variations of the UH-1 family.)
(My profile pic was taken in the cockpit of a 206L… not a Huey, but still a Bell.)
San Francisco == liberal cooties (and maybe still “omg teh gay!” in right wing lingo. That’s most likely why Phantom used that language. JDA apparently lives in Pleasanton, which is closer to San Francisco than San Jose, also in the Bay Area, and more conservative than SF or San Jose. If Phantom had said SF Bay Area, he would have been correct, but that would have sounded less like a slur to the reactionary mind.
@Cora, wow. That excerpt of McEdiface… um, words fail me. TImothy the Talking Cat is, erm, quite a… distinctive… author.
Where might I obtain the entire opus to
giggle atperuse?::waves:: OT sort of. Any recs for Related Work other than CRASH OVERDRIVE? I was looking over my lists and that is an area where I haven’t read much in 2017.
Thank you, O Wise Filers!
@Oneiros: If crows and ravens had opposable thumbs, it would be all over.
@Cassy B The review has a link to the book.
https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/764769
@Beth.
Well, the 2017 Down Under Fan Fund report is eligible for Best Related Work.
https://www.princejvstin.com/buy-a-print-or-image/the-2017-down-under-fan-fund-report
@Beth I don’t think I read anything at all in the category last year (well, online essays, but no individual piece I remember so well I’d nominate it in BRW). EDIT: I am also apparently too tired to read release dates on websites and am getting confused between things I’ve seen in booktuber’s 2017 wrapups and things released in 2017!
(Original recommendation was for The Art of Language Invention, which is on my TBR and I think looks really interesting. And I’m sure it was a worthy contender in 2015.)
And ll this time I thought the real John Carter of Mars was the fellow who transported toilet fixtures from domed city to domed city in a one-thoat wagon.
I’m sadly light on BRW as well. I have Paul Kincaid’s book on Iain M Banks on the tbr but am rather worried I won’t get to it in time.
It’s a proven design, and they are still being made.
@Iphinome, thanks; missed that. I think I was blinded by the prose…
@Paul. Dying Mars RPG? Probably Space 1889. I have the Sky Galleons Of Mars supplement/game that I always mean to use as the basis for an aircar Traveller combat.
@Simon
Nope, this one:
http://www.rpgnow.com/product/25739/MARS-The-Roleplaying-Game-of-Planetary-Romance-d20-version?cPath=272_4256&it=1
@Arifel: The Art of Language Invention is indeed a fascinating book, well worth the read.
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I note that San Jose is 41 miles straight line distance from San Jose, and 11 miles from Mountain View.
Now maybe it’s because I’m not from England, but I don’t see why you can’t conflate Canterbury and Dover and Calais. I mean they’re all in the same area, right?
(11) If Asimov were alive today, he’d be spinning in his grave.
(12) He’s from Canada (like my in-laws) and it’s easy from that perspective for all of California to seem to be in the same place. Lots of Americans are equally provincial about the Maple-Leaf state.
@august & @craig r
Knew there were still a lot around in civilian use, didn’t realise they were still making them though. Having said that Westland are still making the Lynx for RN and Army use which is only slightly newer, though the current one is called Wildcat and has at best 5% parts commonality with the original.
Blackhawk is all you mostly see in the media portrayals of US military.
(3) Bombcom. That is really interesting!
(4) Meaning of declining number of stars. Or: All art is subjective.
(11) Ah-hah! So the concom feared that this whiny, bleating, cyberstalking troll was actually the next Isaac Asimov! Who knew?
Frederick Pohl was one of the Futurians kicked out, and he wrote the most politically charged “SJW message fiction” on my bookshelf. It is really unclear what exactly he wants from SF fandom.
Didn’t Asimov sneak in while Pohl was making a scene, arguing with the organizers at the door?
(8) Thanks for this. I regularly interview publishers for my blog and that seems to be an interesting one.
(11) Another adventure of a second-rate author. It grows tiresome after a while.
(12) Wrong city aside- if you have to construct a geographical connection, you are doong it wrong.
“The File770 Age: Or, A Young Lady’s Scrollulated Pixel”