Past Worldcon chair and First Fandom Hall of Fame inductee Roger Sims died January 23 at the age of 91 after a long struggle with Parkinson’s Disease. Bill Cavin sent an email informing some friends, adding that Roger will be cremated, and his ashes buried at sea per his wishes.
After serving a hitch in the postwar U.S. Navy, Roger returned to Detroit and discovered fandom in 1949. He called a phone number in the letter column of a prozine, and got connected to the Detroit Science Fiction League (nicknamed the Misfits).
Roger Sims in 1945.
At Aussiecon in 1975.
In 1950 he traveled to Portland, Oregon for the Worldcon – the first of more than 50 he would attend. By the time he went to his second he was fully in the swing of things. At the New Orleans Worldcon of 1951 (Nolacon), he rented a room together with Richard Ellsberry, Max Keasler and Ed Kuss. It was number 770. The party they threw there became a byword for fannish good times, a legend that grew in the telling. Roger said in Mimosa that one of the ‘highlights’ “was a parade around the room in which the marchers rather than walking around the furniture, climbed over it. The march was halted when the slats on one of the beds gave way, spilling fans all over the floor.”
A year later, Roger found he had been catapulted to the top of a list of notables to be introduced at Chicon II, however, his fame had yet to register with the person actually doing the introductions. He recalled in Mimosa:
Opening ceremonies at Chicon found me in the audience; Sam Moskowitz was the Master of Ceremonies. After a ‘short’ speech (as only Sam could) he began to introduce the notables in the audience, and the first words out of his mouth were “Roger Sims!” Now, to this day, I believe that he had not looked at the list until he said those two words; I believe this because the next words out of his mouth were, “Who the Hell is that?” But I stood up anyway. At this point there were a few polite claps and a lot of stares. (The reader should remember that I had, as a result of Room 770, only graduated from the ranks of neo fandom the year before! Now, I’m known for other things, of which most are ‘Rogerisms’, but as Bill Bowers is wont to say, “We love you anyway.”)
During his early days in fandom Roger also acquired the nickname, “Teddy Bear.” According to his friend Lynn Hickman this happened at the 1954 Worldcon in San Francisco when, “Roger was making some moves on a good-looking gal (Irene Baron) and her boyfriend came over and asked her if Roger was bothering her. Irene said: ‘Roger? Of course not. He’s just a Teddy Bear.’”
For a short while, Roger worked in New York City. In 1957, he shared an apartment with Harlan Ellison for three months, yielding enough anecdotes to last a lifetime. As he recalled in a Mimosainterview:
…It was an interesting three months of my life. Harlan was continually broke. I had some money that I had saved up, and I would lend it to him. He would get a check and pay me back, and then two days later he would be broke again. We went back and forth like this for the whole three months. Anyway, he had sold a story to W.W. Scott, who was editor of a SF magazine; Scott was going to send him a check and it would arrive Monday. This was Friday. Well, that would take too long; Harlan had to have the money now, so we went down to Scott’s office. While we were waiting for the check, Scott said to Harlan, “Why don’t you write me a story while you’re waiting?” So Harlan sat down and wrote a story, Scott read it and said, “OK, type it up nicely for me and I’ll buy it.” And he gave Harlan his check, which was for $208. On the way home, we stopped and bought a statue, a book, and a chair. He sent money to his mother, and we took a cab home. We arrived there with seven dollars and fifty cents left….
His first marriage was to Mable “Mae” Young, sister of George Young, another Detroit fan, met when she visited New York. To court her he moved back to Michigan. Soon after arriving he was involved with Detroit’s bid for the 1959 Worldcon. They won, and Roger and Fred Prophet co-chaired Detention, as it was named.
Roger’s first marriage was not a success and the couple divorced. Roger married fellow fan Pat Sims in 1964, having met her at Midwestcon the year before.
Together Roger and Pat hosted Ditto 10 (1997), Ditto 17 (2004) and FanHistoriCon 9 (1999). (Ditto 17 was held in Orlando, because by then the Sims had moved to Florida.)
Roger and Pat also became the 1995 Down Under Fan Fund delegates. Non-fan honors bestowed on them (through fannish connections) included being commissioned as Kentucky Colonels, and being named Honorary Captains of The Belle of Louisville.
Roger and Pat Sims in 1990.
Roger’s one pro sf sale was to Mike Resnick’s Alternate Worldcons (1996), “An Old-Fashioned Worldcon,” – “The 1982 Worldcon in Detroit is a classic event with none of the frills such as Masquerade, movies, gaming, Regency dance, etc. All the trufen attend—all four of them.” (Roger was also a character, in Dick Spelman’s “The Forgotten Worldcon of ’45”, in the same anthology.)
When the Worldcon returned to New Orleans in 1988, Roger was Nolacon II’s Fan Guest of Honor. For the Program Book he “set the record straight” about the famous party at the first Nolacon. (Strong drink may have played a role in everyone’s fun, if that’s what was in the 284 empty glasses Roger estimated were stacked on trays left outside the door.)
In 2020 he was inducted to the First Fandom Hall of Fame.
Lynn Hickman called Roger Sims “the nicest, gentlest, most honest person you would ever want to meet” – the very best way to remember a lifelong fan with many accomplishments.
[Thanks to John L. Coker III for supplying these photos from the archives of First Fandom.]
(1) VIEW TRANSIT OF MERCURY ON MONDAY. These occur on average about 13 times each
century. The next one won’t be until the year 2032. Let EclipseWise
tell you about Monday’s event in “2019 Transit of
Mercury”.
On Monday, 2019 November 11, Mercury will transit the Sun for the first time since 2016. The transit or passage of a planet across the face of the Sun is a relatively rare occurrence. As seen from Earth, only transits of Mercury and Venus are possible….
Observing the Transit
Since Mercury is only 1/194 of the Sun’s apparent diameter, a telescope with a magnification of 50x or more is recommended to watch this event. The telescope must be suitably equipped with adequate filtration to ensure safe solar viewing.
(2) SUPERNATURAL EPISODE RECAP. [Item by Martin Morse
Wooster.] In the latest episode of Supernatural a character was
introduced who said she made her living as “the number-one purveyor of
non-authorized ‘Supernatural’ collectibles on Etsy.” She also wrote
fiction set in the Supernatural universe, although it wasn’t clear if
this was fan fiction or professional fiction. But what made the fiction
distinctive was that instead of the typical Supernatural episode, which
has, for 15 thunderous seasons, pitted Sam and Dean Winchester against
vampires, assorted monsters, and the forces of Hell itself, the fan fiction had
the Winchester brothers doing laundry and other chores. This made the
stories very popular.
The
episode didn’t do much with the main character other than having her deal with
another character who was struggling with writer’s block. “The only
way to deal with writer’s block is to write,” she said.
This
is the first TV episode I’ve seen where fan fiction characters were referred to
in the episode…
(3) THE NEW NUMBER TWO. When John Hertz looked at Walter
Day’s Science
Fiction trading cards he noticed that a photo of Isaac Asimov appears on
both Asimov’s and Arthur C. Clarke’s cards in the online gallery. It brought to
mind an anecdote about the two authors which is retold in the “Isaac Asimov FAQ” at Stason.org.
5.5 What is the Asimov-Clarke treaty?
The Asimov-Clarke Treaty of Park Avenue, put together as Asimov and Clarke were travelling down Park Avenue in New York while sharing a cab ride, stated that Asimov was required to insist that Arthur C. Clarke was the best science fiction writer in the world (reserving second best for himself), while Clarke was required to insist that Isaac Asimov was the best science writer in the world (reserving second best for himself). Thus the dedication in Clarke’s book Report on Planet Three reads “In accordance with the terms of the Clarke-Asimov treaty, the second-best science writer dedicates this book to the second-best science-fiction writer”.
(4) SIGHTS TO SEE. Fanac.org’s Joe Siclari called attention
to recent additions to their online collection, photos from the 1959 Worldcon,
and scans of calendars featuring work by two great fanartists, George Barr and
Tim Kirk.
Thanks to Karol DeVore Sissom, we are scanning photos from the collecton of Howard DeVore. Today, we put up 19 photos from Detention from Howard’s collection.Scans by Joe Siclari. http://www.fanac.org/worldcon/Detention/w59-p00.html.
We also added two calendars today, one from 1960 (George Barr) and the other from 1969 (Tim Kirk). They’re now in a directory set aside for calendars, and I’m sure there will be more as we go forward. Scans by Joe Siclari. You can see it at: http://fanac.org/fanzines/Calendars/.
(5) CAREER CHANGE. “In today’s political climate, battling
supervillains might seem an easier gig“ — “X-Men’s
‘Rogue’ is now a Liberal MP”and The Star has the story.
Actor-turned-politician Lenore Zann is finding a second act in politics just as one of her most well-known roles finds a second life on the streaming screen.
Zann, a longtime New Democrat MLA from Nova Scotia, arrived in Ottawa this week as a newly elected Liberal MP.
Rogue, the character Zann voiced in the iconic 90s X-Men: The Animated Series, will be on Disney’s new streaming service along with the rest of the superhero team when that service launches in Canada next week….
(6) MALTIN PODCAST. [Item by Martin Morse Wooster.] In Leonard and Jessie Maltin’s podcast with James Gray, they talk about cosplay beginning at minute 14, when Gray asks, “At what point did adults start dressing up like Captain America at Comic-Con?” and then segue into Martin Scorsese’s complaint about the MCU films not being cinema. Gray argues that the decline in the humanities in the past decade meant that more young people don’t have as deep a knowledge of film as previous generations do. At minute 20, they switch to deep and interesting film talk.
Gray
never discusses why he decided to make a sf film with Ad Astra, although
he did say he enjoyed working with Donald Sutherland.
Also,
Leonard Maltin revealed at the end of the podcast that he always sits through
the credits because “the movie isn’t over until you’ve been threatened
with civil and criminal prosecution.”
In this episode, special guest Jennifer Albright of Have You Seen This? drops by to talk about Mary Sues, a term used to describe an overly-perfect female character created as a self-insertion wish fulfillment vehicle for the author. The discussion traces the expression Mary Sue back to its origin in Star Trek fanfiction and tries to grapple with its current usage. Does Mary Sue mean anything anymore? Is it a misogynistic term? Is Rey from Star Wars a Mary Sue? Is James Bond a Mary Sue? Does it really matter if a character is a Mary Sue?
(8) BOOKS FRANK MILLER LOVES. Shelf Awareness brings
you “Reading
with… Frank Miller”, best known for Daredevil, The Dark
Knight Returns, Sin City and 300.
Favorite book when you were a child:
The Adventures of Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi, because he went for impossible adventure.
Your top five authors:
Isaac Asimov: He was the godfather of modern science fiction. He took us beyond the rocket ships and bug-eyed monsters.
Raymond Chandler: For his urban romantic poetry that celebrated 1940s Los Angeles.
Dashiell Hammett: His town was San Francisco; his dialogue was clipped, yet wildly evocative. His heroes were tough and very, very alone.
Dorothy B. Hughes: She brought a distinctly feminine edge to the hard-boiled genre and, in her own way, was ready to take us to darker places than any of the rest.
Mickey Spillane: For his pounding and frenetic portrait of New York City in the post-World War II era.
In 1950, a New York City police officer who was working missing-persons cases examined the body of an approximately 30-year-old man that was brought into the morgue. The man had shown up in the middle of Times Square at 11:15 p.m. that evening, “gawking and looking around at the cars and up at the signs like he’d never seen them before,” then was quickly hit and killed by cab when he tried to cross a street against the traffic lights.
The pockets of the deceased’s clothing held multiple pieces of coinage and currency of forms that had not been produced for several decades, yet many of them were in mint condition. His possessions also included items from types of businesses that no longer existed in New York City (i.e., a bill from a livery stable and a brass slug from a saloon), a letter postmarked in 1876, and cards bearing the name Rudolph Fentz with an address on Fifth Avenue….
Rod Serling remains one of the more influential writers in the annals of science fiction. As creator of The Twilight Zone, he took took viewers to strange dimensions and pushed the boundaries of what the genre could do. Yet, part of him feared he would not leave a lasting legacy. That’s one of the topics tackled in Remembering Rod Serling, a new documentary that will be unveiled Nov. 14 in theaters via Fathom Events to celebrate The Twilight Zone‘s 60th anniversary.
(11) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]
Born November 9, 1886 — Ed Wynn. He appeared on The Twilight Zone in “One for the Angels” which Sterling wrote specifically for him. He appeared one more time on the series in, “Ninety Years Without Slumbering”. He provided the voice of the Mad Hatter in Alice in Wonderland and played The Toymaker in Babes in Toyland. No doubt his best-remembered film appearance was in Mary Poppins as Uncle Albert. Bet you can name the scene he’s best remembered for! (Died 1966.)
Born November 9, 1921 — Alfred Coppel. Have I ever mentioned how much I love pulp? Everything from the writers to the artwork to the magazines themselves are so, so cool. And this writer was one of the most prolific such authors of the Fifties and Sixties. That he was also a SF writer is an added bonus. Indeed, his first science fiction story was “Age of Unreason” in a 1947 Amazing Stories. Under the pseudonym of Robert Cham Gilman, he wrote the Rhada sequence of galactic space opera novels aimed at a young adult market. Wiki claims he writing under A.C. Marin as well but I cannot find any record of this. (Died 2004.)
Born November 9, 1924 — Alan Caillou. The Head in the Quark series. If you have to ask… Last role was Count Paisley in Ice Pirates and his first was on the One Step Beyond series. (Died 2006.)
Born November 9, 1924 — Lawrence T. Shaw. A Hugo Award-winning fan, author, editor and literary agent. In the Forties and Fifties, Larry Shaw edited Nebula, Infinity Science Fiction and Science Fiction Adventures. He received a Special Committee Award during the 1984 Worldcon for lifetime achievement as an editor. (Died 1985.)
Born November 9, 1954 — Rob Hansen, 65. British fan, active since the Seventies who has edited and co-edited numerous fanzines including his debut production Epsilon. And he was the 1984 Trans-Atlantic Fan Fund delegate. His nonfiction works such as Then: Science Fiction Fandom in the UK: 1930-1980, lasted updated just a few years ago, are invaluable.
Born November 9, 1973 — Gabrielle Miller, 46. Her first genre series was Highlander: The Series. And yes, she had long red hair in it. That’s followed by M.A.N.T.I.S., Outer Limits, X-Files, The Sentinel, Dead Man’s Gun, Stargate SG-1, Viper, Poltergeist, Welcome to Paradox… oh, you get the idea.
Born November 9, 1974 — Ian Hallard, 45. He was on Doctor Who as Alan-a-Dale in “Robot of Sherwood”, a Twelfth Doctor story; in Sherlock as Mr Crayhill in “The Reichenbach Fall”; and he played one of the original directors of Doctor Who, Richard Martin, in An Adventure in Space and Time. And he wrote “The Big Four” episode with Mark Gatiss for the Agatha Christie series.
(12) JFK. Gideon Marcus (Galactic Journey) is lining
up fans who are interested in a free alternate history story.
What if JFK hadn't been all we lost on Nov. 22, 1963?
Follow, like, and retweet/share for a FREE copy of our newest short story: "Sad All Over"
Harry Lee Poe, a professor of faith and culture at Union University in Jackson, Tenn., pores over the first 20 years of C. S. Lewis’s life in Becoming C. S. Lewis: A Biography of Young Jack Lewis (1898-1918), the first of a three-volume biography of Lewis by Poe.
Why did you decide to look so closely at these first 20 years of Lewis’s life?
Virtually all of Lewis’s biographers have puzzled over why he devoted most of his spiritual biography, Surprised by Joy, to his first 20 years. As I first began to read the letters of young Jack Lewis from the time when he first went away to school, I realized why Lewis thought his childhood and youth were so important in his conversion. During this period, he developed all of his major tastes about what he enjoyed in life and what he hated. Many of the ideas that he would pursue in both his scholarly work and his popular writings have their genesis in his teenage years. Whether books like The Allegory of Love and A Preface to Paradise Lost, or The Chronicles of Narnia and Mere Christianity, many of the ideas found in these books were topics of Lewis’s interest in letters to [lifelong friend] Arthur Greeves when he was 16 and 17….
Fossils of a newly-discovered ancient ape could give clues to how and when walking on two legs evolved.
The ability to walk upright is considered a key characteristic of being human.
The ape had arms suited to hanging in the trees, but human-like legs.
It may have walked along branches and even on the ground some 12 million years ago, pushing back the timeline for bipedal walking, say researchers.
Until now the earliest fossil evidence for walking upright dates back to six million years ago.
(15) VINTAGE MOONDUST UNCORKED. Smithsonian
Magazine:“NASA Opens Pristine Tube of Moon Dust From the Apollo
Missions”. Tagline: “Studying the lunar material will help
scientists understand the best way to analyze new samples from future missions
to the moon”
NASA scientists recently opened a sample tube of rock and soil collected on the moon during Apollo 17. The tube remained unopened for nearly 47 years, and it is the first time NASA scientists have broken in to a fresh moon sample in over four decades. Researchers are using the lunar dirt to test next-generation sampling tools in preparation for the next time humans fly to the moon.
The sample tube holds about 15 ounces of lunar regolith, or loose rocky material from the surface. Apollo 17 astronauts Gene Cernan and Jack Schmitt collected the material during mission in December of 1972, NASA’s last crewed mission to the moon. The sample, 73002, was taken from a two-foot-long tube that the astronauts drove into a landslide deposit in a feature called the Lara Crater. A second sample, 73001, is scheduled to be opened in January.
In the latest installment of SYFY WIRE’s Behind the Panel, we’re roaming the halls of New York Comic Con while searching for an elusive Treasury Edition: MGM’s Marvelous Wizard of Oz. True story: That was the first-ever collaboration between Marvel and DC. But their second collaboration was a true game changer: Superman vs. The Amazing Spider-Man.
That’s right, the unthinkable crossover already happened in 1976, with a follow-up sequel in 1981. Only the Treasury Edition format could fully capture the twin heroic icons of comics as they had their inevitable battle before their equally inevitable team-up to save the day. For the time, Superman vs. The Amazing Spider-Man was the comic book equivalent of a blockbuster movie. That Treasury Edition is long out of print, but fans may be lucky enough to spot it at comic conventions.
(17) FROM THE LETTERZINE ZEEN. Kim Huett shares another gem
from his files with readers of Doctor Strangemind. “One of the reasons I find nosing through old fanzines so
worthwhile are the contemporary reactions to stories and authors. It’s always
fun to discover reviews of the big names back when they were just starting out.
As you can probably imagine I was most pleased to find what I suspect was the
first critical reaction to Ursula Le Guin.” — “In the Beginning”
… Take for example consider the following comments by US fan, Earl Evers, who reviewed the contents of the April 1964 issue of Fantastic Stories of Imagination in his fanzine, Zeen #2 within weeks of it hitting the shelves. In the process of reviewing this magazine, story by story, he had the following to say about what was one of Ursula K. Le Guin’s earliest published stories…
(18) VIDEO OF THE DAY. Kim Huett also shared this link for…
reasons:
Here’s an #Owlkitty video which more than adequately explains exactly why Tolkien didn’t feature cats in either Lord of the Rings or The Hobbit. Yes, the right cat would make a great Balrog or an excellent Nazgal mount except cats have minds of their own and I can’t imagine Sauron would like that (besides, they would stare right back at him and it doesn’t take an All Seeing Eye to find that sort of behavior annoying):
[Thanks to Cat Eldridge, Andrew Porter, John Hertz, Rich Lynch, Chip Hitchcock, John King Tarpinian, RS Benedict, Olav Rokne, Martin Morse Wooster, JJ, Kim Huett, and Mike Kennedy for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Patrick Morris Miller.]
It turns out the idea of living dead—depending how you define both “living” and “dead”—may not be as far-fetched as it might seem. Some science fiction writers have found inspiration—and trepidation—in real-life parasites. We talked to two of them, Mira Grant and M.R. Carey, about their newest books and the concept of scientific zombies.
…Carey searched for a pathogen that met his criteria for the cause of the hungry epidemic, and realized that Cordyceps fit perfectly. It was also a unique choice. “At the time nobody had ever used a fungus as the vector for a zombie plague,” he says, though the creators of a console game called The Last of Us came up with the same idea independently, around the same time.
… Besides reading, Grant also “spent a lot of time on the phone with the CDC, which was an incredible amount of fun.” Grant savored the information she gleaned that way, but her friends “had to make new rules about what I was allowed to discuss over food,” so they didn’t lose their appetites.
Though still working on the translation, Fitt and his publisher released the opening paragraph, which reads: “Mr and Mrs Dursley, o nummer fower, Privet Loan, were prood tae say that they were gey normal, thank ye awfie muckle. They were the lest fowk ye wid jalouse wid be taigled up wi onythin unco or ferlie, because they jist widnae hae onythin tae dae wi joukery packery like yon.”
In his first adventure, Harry leaves the cruel Dursley family to attend Hogwarts wizarding school, which has long been understood to be based somewhere in the Scottish Highlands, where Scots speakers exist in their highest numbers.
Something has to change. Our elections are being targeted by Russia, our shipping system was hijacked this week and congress continues to try to spy on you with your smartphone. It doesn’t have to be this way. I have a plan
Just 15 people in the US House determine our nation’s tech policy on the Science and Technology Subcommittee.
Meaning just 8 votes control our policy on privacy, encryption, and net neutrality. The giant telecoms have a voice. Shouldn’t you?
Please contribute, so we can get Brianna Wu elected to US Congress in 2018, representing Massachusetts District 8! Help fight for a braver, bolder Democratic party!
Isaac Asimov science fiction trilogy Foundation heavily informed Star Wars and many other sci-fi films and TV series, but for decades it has confounded Hollywood attempts at a straight adaptation. I’m hearing that Skydance, David S. Goyer and Josh Friedman are going to try to crack it. Skydance Television is closing a deal with the Asimov estate to try turning Foundation into a sprawling TV series.
… The biggest creative quandary, I’ve heard from those who tried to adapt Foundation, is that so many of Asimov’s themes found their way into George Lucas’s Star Wars that the challenge is to not appear to be ripping off one of Hollywood’s most successful film franchises, even though Asimov wrote his books 75 years ago. Considering that Lucasfilm continues to borrow from that mythology with myriad Star Wars sequels and spinoff films, perhaps a TV series is the best bet.
(5) QUALIFYING MARKET. Joe Stech, publisher/editor of Compelling Science Fiction, is delighted to report —
Compelling Science Fiction is now one of the few magazines worldwide that is considered a professional “Qualifying Market” by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America: Short fiction Qualifying Markets
SFWA is a wonderful organization that supports authors in a huge number of ways (our own publishing contract is adapted from SFWA’s model magazine contract). SFWA also hosts the annual Nebula Awards. While we have always paid professional rates, this recognition means that our published authors will find it much easier to use their publication in our magazine to meet SFWA membership requirements, because we have already been vetted.
(6) NOT JUST FOR COMPULSIVE READERS: Jason’s Featured Futures is back with another selection of stories (with links and comments) in the “Summation of Online Fiction June 2017”.
The twelve prozines of June produced thirty-eight stories and I read thirty-five of them at about 165K words. (Tor.com should have posted a fourth story on the 28th but didn’t. If it comes out today or tomorrow, I’ll update this post accordingly.) The random flukes of this month were a large number of honorable mentions (with not so many recommendations) which were mostly SF, half of which came from almost the entire issue of Compelling Science Fiction. Given that, I’ll basically do a mini-review of the whole issue after the lists.
About 66 million years ago, a 10-kilometer-wide hunk of rock smashed into Earth near what is now Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula.
The impact created a global dust cloud that snuffed out the sunlight, leading to the demise of 80 percent of Earth’s plants and animals—including most of the dinosaurs. A 200-kilometer-wide crater buried near the city of Chicxulub is all that’s left. It’s ground zero for one of the world’s most notable extinction events.
But throughout Earth’s history, there have actually been five major extinction events. The largest of these occurred about 250 million years ago, when a whopping 96 percent of life on Earth died. Scientists aren’t sure what caused the event, known as “the Great Dying.” If it was a Chicxulub-sized impact; no one has ever found the crater.
Until possibly now.
A trio of scientists—one of whom is funded by The Planetary Society—thinks they may have found it. Off the coast of South America, near the Falkland Islands, there appears to be a 250-kilometer-wide crater buried under ocean sediment. An upcoming paper in the August edition of the peer-reviewed journal Terra Nova suggests it was formed by a massive asteroid or comet bigger than the one that hit Chicxulub.
(8) TODAY’S DAY
Asteroid Day
A global awareness event where people from around the world come together to learn about what we can do to protect Earth from an asteroid impact. Did you know that, as you’re reading this, there are likely one million near-Earth asteroids large enough to do severe damage if they hit Earth? We don’t have to go the way of the dinosaurs. Learn more about what we can do to reduce the threat:
(9) TODAY IN HISTORY
June 30, 1971 – Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory was released.
June 30, 1972 — The fourth film in the series — Conquest of the Planet of the Apes — premiered theatrically.
(10) COMIC SECTION. John King Tarpinian calls your attention to Bizarro for June 30.
(11) DISNEYLAND. When the Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disneyland is updated the bride auction scene will be going away. However, the iconic redhead will still be around – as a pirate helping to rob the townspeople. According to the Orange County Register:
The pirates will no longer be saying “We wants the Redhead” in Pirates of the Caribbean at Disneyland after the auction scene undergoes a modification in 2018.
The Walt Disney Company plans to make changes to the auction scene in the classic attraction at Disneyland, Walt Disney World and Disneyland Paris in the coming year, according to Suzi Brown, spokeswoman for the Disneyland Resort.
While the scene has long been a favorite of many Disney fans, it has occasionally been the brunt of criticism for what some believed to be a “sexist” approach to women. Years ago, the scene that comes after the auction scene, which used to have pirates chasing women, was changed to pirates chasing women for food, and one where a woman was chasing a pirate.
When asked about the sexism Brown said, in a statement, “We believe the time is right to turn the page to a new story in this scene, consistent with the humorous, adventurous spirit of the attraction.”
In the auction scene, the Redhead will become a pirate, helping the Auctioneer gather valuables from the townspeople to auction off to the pirates.
The first version of the attraction to receive the new scene will be at Disneyland Paris next month, with the two domestic parks receiving it within the next year or so.
There was nothing amusing or cute about what real-life pirates did when they sacked a town, so in the midst of a musical horror fantasy about such an event it’s interesting where they think they need to redraw the line in 2017 to keep people from being reminded of that.
(12) URB APPEAL. Andrew Porter noticed you can now buy a condo in Detroit where the 1959 Worldcon (Detention) was held. If that idea appeals to you.
When the Fort Shelby became a Doubletree Hotel in 2008 on the first ten floors, the developers used tax credits to turn the 56 units above into apartments. Now that the time has passed for the credits, the apartments can be turned into condos, and a few of them have already listed.
They start at $280,000 for a one-bedroom and go up to $570,000 for a three-bedroom on a higher level. Six penthouses will also be available on the 21st floor, and those will run from $350,000 to $815,000.
According to the Loft Warehouse, the listing firm, four are ready now and another 19 are in the pipeline for the year as apartment leases run out.
A California house designed to resemble a home from the Flintstones cartoon sold for nearly $3 million after multiple price drops.
Judy Meuschke of Alain Pinel Realtors said the unique property sold for $2.8 million in May after arriving on the market for a price of $4.2 million in 2015.
The property features a rounded, stone-like exterior with grey and orange walls, closely resembling the cavelike homes in the Flinstones’ home of Bedrock City.
(14) ONE MILLION BC. More information about the forthcoming Marvel Legacy.
It all starts with MARVEL LEGACY #1.
Journey to the dawn of time, as Marvel introduces you to the first Avengers from 1,000,000 BC – when iconic torch-bearers such as Odin, Iron Fist, Starbrand, Ghost Rider, Phoenix, Agamotto, and Black Panther come together for the startling origin of the Marvel Universe, in MARVEL LEGACY #1 on sale this September in comic shops everywhere!
“MARVEL LEGACY #1 isn’t simply a history lesson,” says SVP and Executive Editor Tom Brevoort. “Rather, it’s the starting gun to a bevy of mysteries, secrets, and revelations that will reverberate across the Marvel Universe in the weeks and months to come! No character, no franchise will be untouched by the game-changing events that play out across its pages. Jason and Esad pulled out all the stops to fat-pack this colossal issue with as much intrigue, action, surprise, mystery, shock, and adventure as possible!”
Golden Compass author Philip Pullman surprised millions of fans late last year when he announced that he would be returning to the world of the immensely popular His Dark Materials trilogy.
His three new books — the first set 10 years before the original trilogy and the next two coming after the events in those books — will once again transport readers to Lyra’s Oxford. The first volume in the companion Book of Dust trilogy is La Belle Sauvage (for which you can exclusively see the cover below), which centers on Malcolm Polstead and is in fact named for his canoe, which will become a central part of the story. But fans needn’t worry, as not only will Lord Asriel (and his daemon Stelmaria) definitely make an appearance in the book along with baby Lyra Belacqua (the main protagonist of the best-selling books), but careful readers of the previous books may remember that Malcolm himself had had a brief appearance in them….
This new trilogy has an interesting timeline. What inspired you to make the first book in this companion trilogy more of a prequel to the original trilogy, as opposed to a sequel like the two proceeding books?
The story I found myself telling had a beginning that closely involved Lyra, but it happened when she was about six months old. Then came an interval, during which some of the consequences of the first part were worked out in the story of His Dark Materials, when she was about 11 or 12. But other things were still lying in the ground, waiting to germinate. About 10 years after the events in His Dark Materials, the first shoots of those other things begin to emerge from the ground. But because they’re not really a consequence of His Dark Materials, I don’t want to call them a sequel; and because I don’t like the word “prequel,” I didn’t want to call the first book by that word. So I call The Book of Dust an “equel.”
If you thought Fox was slowing down on movies based on Marvel Comics properties, the 2018 slate, featuring New Mutants on April 13, 2018, Deadpool 2 on June 1, 2018, and X-Men: Dark Phoenix on November 2, 2018, probably put that thought to bed. If even that plan didn’t show you their dedication to the franchise, well, this should: 20th Century Fox has reserved release dates for 2019, 2020, and spring 2021 marking six Marvel movie releases in just 21 months.
New Fox/Marvel movies will hit theaters on June 7, 2019, November 22, 2019, March 13, 2020, June 26 2020, October 2, 2020, and March 5, 2021. The production house has not indicated at all whether those will be X-Men or Fantastic Four films, the two properties they currently own film rights to from Marvel Entertainment. This is a common practice in the blockbuster release category nowadays;
There’s a new type of airship called the Cloud, and it has a silver lining. (It’s also a giant, floating communications hub.) Finn Aberdein goes to watch a nerve-wracking flight with its maker KuangChi Science.
(18) THE WONDER WOMAN WHO MARRIED A MAN. It’s cosplay. In “The ultimate fantasy wedding: Wonder Woman weds Deadpool at Awesome Con”, the Washington Post’s Megan McDonough talks about how Megan Mattingly and Adam Merica got married at Awesome Con, and how her Wonder Woman gown was stitched together by three female cosplayers in 48 hours.
They decided right away that a full cosplay wedding, right down to the dress, would suit them best. By that point, Megan had accumulated a following in the cosplay community (she has more than 45,000 followers on Instagram) and founded the local group DC CosGeeks. She also didn’t want a repeat of her first wedding, which was much more conventional.
(19) LIFE CYCLES. Artis Lives on Vimeo is a fun cartoon promoting the Amsterdam Royal Zoo.
[Thanks to Martin Morse Wooster, Chip Hitchcock, Jason, JJ, Cat Eldridge, John King Tarpinian, Daniel Dern, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Steve Davidson.]
By John Hertz: (reprinted from Vanamonde 1203) On June 29th we lost Fred Prophet (born 7 Jul 1929), co-chair with Roger Sims of Detention the 17th World Science Fiction Convention (4-7 Sep 59, Detroit, Michigan), whose publicity was headed by George Young, the head upon which as I understand was previously the first propeller beanie.
This was the Worldcon of the celebrated panel discussion — a panel of fanzine editors, John Berry (brought from Ireland by a special fund), Ron Ellik, Boyd Raeburn, Wally Weber, Ted White, moderated by Bjo Trimble — which began Sunday night, attended by six dozen, and ran until 4:30 a.m. having somehow adjourned to Harlan Ellison’s hotel room, leading Bjo to explain “After that they wouldn’t let me moderate panels anymore.” Her name is written with a caret over the “j” (possibly beyond Glyer’s or your software) to show by an Esperantism the pronunciation “bee-joe”.
Opening Ceremonies hauled a seeming corpse across the stage: Howard DeVore had said a Worldcon could only be held in Detroit, his home town, over his dead body. Alas, that did stop our giving the Big Heart Award (first presented in Detention) to Howard forty-seven years later. By then he’d long been Big-Hearted Howard anyway.
When I first met Fred, a while if not quite so long later, he still looked like his photograph in A Wealth of Fable (photo by Elinor Busby; book by Harry Warner, Jr.; 1992 rev. p. 403). After that I dared call him the Prophet of S-F.
Detention seems to have detained us all from holding another Worldcon there, but we did make Detcon the 11th NASFiC (17-20 Jul 2014; North America S-F Con, since 1975 held when the Worldcon is overseas). Shall we have a Detention or Detcon II?
Detcon made Fred and Roger its Con Chairs Emeriti. When Geri Sullivan put up a banner in the Fanzine Lounge where one could sign for each NASFiC one had attended I had the honor, or luck, to find Fred and get him to sign it. R.I.P.
Roger Sims and Fred Prophet, co-chairs of 1959 Worldcon, Detention, on a panel at the 2014 NASFiC in Detroit.
By Mike Resnick: Thanks to all the stink raised by both sides at Worldcon, I have an editorial, “The End of Worldcon as We Know It”, in the just published issue of Galaxy’s Edge. It’s accessable online for free…and if you’d like to run it in File 770, you have my blessing.
The recent brouhaha (a much better word than kerfluffle) over the Hugo ballot has caused a number of people, online and elsewhere, to proclaim that this is The End of Worldcon, at least the End of Worldcon As We Know It.
So it’s probably time for a little history lesson, because you know what will actually cause The End of Worldcon As We Know It?
Peace, camaraderie, and tranquility.
You think not?
Do you know what Fredrik Pohl, Donald A. Wollheim, Cyril M. Kornbluth, and Robert A. W. Lowndes have in common? I mean, besides their positions as giants in the annals of science fiction, with Wollheim and Pohl being Worldcon Guests of Honor, Kornbluth being still in print six decades after his premature death, and Lowndes editing for close to half a century?
They were all stopped at the door and not allowed to attend the very first Worldcon back in 1939.
No kidding. It was clearly going to be the End of Worldcon before it was even born.
It’s all written up in The Immortal Storm: A History of Science Fiction Fandom in the 1930s, by Sam Moskowitz, the guy who turned them away. (It seems they wouldn’t sign a pledge to behave and to not distribute Futurian John Michel’s Communist diatribe at the convention. Of course, while these four and Michel were being refused entry, Dave Kyle quietly brought a bundle of copies of Michel’s tract, Mutation or Death, into the con.)
It has become known in the field’s history books as The Exclusion Act. Well, in those histories written before 1956…after which it is known as the First Exclusion Act.
Move the clock ahead and stop it in 1964, the year of the Breendoggle.
You don’t know about the Breendoggle?
It seems that the Pacificon committee decided to bar the spouse of a major writer from attending, and this caused quite an uproar, to the point where literally half of fandom was threatening to boycott the convention if he came, and the other half threatened to boycott it if he was not permitted to attend. It was certainly going to be the End of Worldcon As We Know It.
At the last minute, the spouse elected not to attend, and the Worldcon went off as scheduled. So who was the spouse, I hear you ask? Walter Breen, the husband of Marion Zimmer Bradley. And why didn’t the committee want him to attend? If I tell you that he’d been arrested for pederasty in 1954, and died in jail in 1990 while serving time for child molesting, I think you’ll be able to intuit it.
Clifford D. Simak was not only a fine writer, but probably the most decent and gentle man ever to appear in this field. He was the Guest of Honor at the 1971 Worldcon, during the height of the truly acrimonious Old Wave/New Wave War. He spent most of his Guest of Honor speech talking not about himself, or his writing, or even science fiction, but rather attempting to make peace between the warring sides. Alas, he was too rational and made too much sense; the war continued unabated.
But (I hear you say) this End of Worldcon As We Know It is being caused by Hugo balloting, not all that other stuff that delights fannish historians every few years. Surely there’s never been a problem with voting before!
OK, guys—come back from Barsoom and Mesklin and Hyborea, and spend a little time in the real world again.
Not that long ago, in 1989, the Hugo Committee received a number of ballots for a certain up-and-coming artist. Problem was, most of the voters’ memberships were paid for with consecutively-numbered money orders from the same post office. The committee decided not to allow his name on the ballot, though he had enough paid-for votes. (I am told that some people are publicly buying and giving away a number of memberships to this year’s Worldcon. I have no idea what the Hugo committee plans to do about it.)
Of course, that’s far from the only “irregularity.” Remember a couple of years ago, in 2013, when there were only three short stories on the ballot? The reason for that is embedded in the Hugo rules: to make the ballot, a nominee in any category must receive at least 5% of the ballots cast.
Now remember back to 1994. Not the same situation, you say? You just looked, and there were five short stories nominated.
Well, you’re almost right. Only three short stories received 5% of the nominations. So the Hugo Administrator, in his infinite wisdom, added two novelettes to the ballot to fill it out—and sure enough, a novelette won the 1994 Hugo for Best Short Story.
Ah, but this year will be different, I hear you say. This year we’ll be voting No Award in a bunch of categories, and history will thank us.
Well, it just so happens that No Award has triumphed before. In fact, it has won Best Dramatic Presentation three different times. (Bet you didn’t know that Rod Serling’s classic “Twilight Zone” series lost to No Award, did you?)
But the most interesting and humiliating No Award came in 1959. The category was Best New Writer, and one of the losers was future Worldcon Guest of Honor and Nebula Grand Master Brian Aldiss, who actually won a Hugo in 1962, just three years later. That No Award was so embarrassing that they discontinued the category until they could find a sponsor eight years later, which is how the Campbell Award, sponsored by Analog, came into being.
Please note that I’ve limited myself to Worldcons. I haven’t mentioned the X Document or the Lem Affair or any of the other notable wars you can find in various pro and fannish histories (or probably even by just googling them). This editorial is only concerned with The End of Worldcon As We Know It.
And hopefully by now the answer should be apparent. You want to End Worldcon As We Know It? Don’t feud. Don’t boycott. Don’t be unpleasant. Don’t be unreasonable. Don’t raise your voices in mindless anger.
Do all that and none of us will recognize the Worldcon that emerges.
