Tag Archives: The Drink Tank

Overserved at The Drink Tank?

Posted on by

Two of the last three Best Fan Writer Hugos have been won by Hugo nominated novelists. Taral vents his frustration that more people don’t find this controversial in “The Way the Futurian Blogs,” an article in The Drink Tank #259 (PDF file). I’m not a fan of the accompanying graphic, an altered paperback cover of Pohl with a hole in his head — both distasteful and disrespectful.

Also not very perceptive, if the idea behind the image is to fault Pohl for winning. Pohl did not ordain this result, his victory came out of a popular movement. I understood this much better after hearing the tone in Andrew Trembley’s voice as he told fans at Westercon how much he loved reading anecdotes about the history of the sf field on Fred Pohl’s blog. At that moment I thought d’oh! I’d forgotten what it is like to hear these stories for the first time. Some I heard as a young fan from Pohl’s First Fandom contemporaries. Others I read in Pohl’s 1978 autobiography The Way the Future Was. To the latest generation of science fiction fans they are brand new. And they’re great stories. And they’re about science fiction, which (big news here) a lot of science fiction fans still find interesting.

Yes, I tried to persuade fans to go in another direction and vote for someone else. Somebody who’s not already a famous sf writer. Guess what? I lost. World ends, film at 11? No, and what’s more, I’m even allowed to like the winner.

Taral Fills The Drink Tank

Posted on by

Taral will soon be making his 50th contribution to Chris Garcia’s frequent fanzine The Drink Tank as we reported not long ago. But then the dynamic duo asked themselves — why stop there? Taral writes:

You might be amused that the entire issue of Drink Tank 258 will be written and drawn by myself, with the exception of some photos found with Google. Chris and I cooked up the idea when discussing the upcoming 50th Drink Tank article by me. I’ve already written three articles for it, an editorial, and all the locs. I “invited” Chris to write a guest editorial, and he’s doing all the production work.

Hugo Analysis in Drink Tank

Posted on by

Chris Garcia and James Bacon have created a magnificent Drink Tank theme issue about the Hugo Novels. The 37-page fanzine is rich with thoughts and comments on the category’s history and this year’s nominees in particular. It boasts contributions from Michael Moorcock (reprinted from The Guardian), Cory Doctrow (from BoingBoing) , Niall Harrison, Paul Kincaid and Peter Weston. But you may agree that the liveliest parts are those written by Chris and James themselves.

Click here to read Drink Tank #252 (PDF file).

Taral Nears 50th Contribution to Drink Tank

Posted on by

Taral Wayne soon will send his 50th contribution to Chris Garcia’s frequent fanzine The Drink Tank.

Taral’s first appearance came relatively late in the zine’s history — issue 153, responding to Frank Wu’s interview questions. Since then he’s found it a great outlet for his work. He recently sent Chris his 46th article and knows the other four are bound to follow. 

“Those articles are among the best I’ve ever got to publish!” says Chris. “It’s been an absolute pleasure to have them and I hope he’ll keep sending them and allowing me to make it up to 100!”

Taral’s loyalty is readily explained: “The big advantage of DT is that Chris will publish ephemera that will date in as little as a month and doesn’t add isn’t the sort of headliner suited to Banana Wings or Trapdoor.”

Taral has become such a prolific contributor, admits Chris, that “In the last year, Taral has had more words in The Drink Tank than I have (at least count). I don’t think I’d managed to have done half as many issues as I managed in the last year-and-a-half without him on board!”

Click for Taral's handwritten list of his articles for The Drink Tank.

The Barmy Cats Adventures

Posted on by

It turns out to have been a mystery only to me, that nagging question I’ve been pondering for several weeks: Why did C*****s D*****s pen “A Corflu Carol” (The Drink Tank #158), lampooning Cheryl Morgan with such rich humor I was embarrassed to admit how hard I’d laughed? Mainly because I didn’t know who really threw this barb, or whether Cheryl would find it funny (it might remind her of blunt comments made by trufen in past years). Now that I’ve learned the full context, I expect she had no problem with it at all, if it turns out she didn’t write it herself (I haven’t stumbled across that answer yet).

“A Corflu Carol” soars from its opening lines:

Fanzine fandom was dead, to begin with. There is no doubt whatsoever about that. The register of its burial was signed by the costumers, the filkers, the conrunners, and the furries. Emcit Eljay signed it, and Emcit Eljay’s name was good for a fan Hugo. Fanzine fandom was as dead as a doornail.

Had I not (evidently) slept through January 3, I’d have already known this was either the answering salvo to, or perhaps a tangential development of, Cheryl’s comical new series of “Barmy Cats Adventures,” launched by the appearance of “The Clubhouse Affair” in The Drink Tank #157.

My encounter with “The Clubhouse Affair” waited ’til today when I caught up reading Cheryl’s personal blog. She explained the whole project on January 20, giving verbal snapshots of all the characters. Cheryl concluded, after reading the recent debates about Core Fandom, that it would be “quite funny to imagine a world in which the brave freedom fighters of Core Fandom really were engaged in a bitter struggle against the greedy capitalists of WSFS.” And in her hands, it is funny.