Originally posted by: utzoo!decvax!harpo!npois!ucbvax!sf-lovers
Article-I.D.: ucbvax.7230
Posted: Tue May 18 09:41:27 1982
Received: Thu May 20 02:10:48 1982
>From JPM@Mit-Ai Tue May 18 08:49:37 1982
SF-LOVERS Digest Monday, 17 May 1982 Volume 5 : Issue 52
Today's Topics:
SF Fandom - Nebula Winners & Hugo Ballot,
SF Movies - Conan The Barbarian & The Secret of NIMH &
Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan & Revenge of the Jedi,
SF TV - Battelstar Galactica, Random Topics - Foonlys
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: 05/17/82 1144-EDT
From: THOKAR at LL
Subject: Nebula Winners and Hugo Ballot
Having had my copy of Locus for almost a week now and not having seen
it in the digest yet, I feel obliged to send in both the Nebula
winners and the Hugo ballot. So, here goes.
Nebula Winners:
Best Novel -- The Claw of the Conciliator (Gene Wolfe)
Best Novella -- "The Saturn Game" (Poul Anderson)
Best Novelette -- "The Quickening" (Michael Bishop)
Best Short Story -- "The Bone Flute" (Lisa Tuttle)
A Nebula citation (subject unknown) went to Ed Ferman of F&SF, also a
Nebula citation (again subject unknown) went to Stanley Schmidt of
Analog. A third Nebula citation (and again subject unknown) went to
David G. Hartwell of Timescape Books.
1982 Hugo Nomination Ballot
Best Novel
__ Downbelow Station -- C.J. Cherryh (DAW)
__ Little, Big -- John Crowley (Bantam)
__ The Many-Colored Land -- Julian Man (Houghton Mifflin)
__ Project Pope -- Clifford D. Simak (Del Rey)
__ The Claw of the Conciliator -- Gene Wolfe (Simon & Schuster)
__ No Award
Best Novella
__ "The Saturn Game" -- Poul Anderson (Analog, Feb 2)
__ "In the Western Tradition" -- Phyllis Eisenstein (F&SF, Mar)
__ "Emergence" -- David R. Palmar (Analog, Jan)
__ "Blue Champagne" -- John Varley (New Voices 4)
__ "True Names" -- Vernor Vinge (Binary Star 5) !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
__ "With Thimbles, With Forks and Hope" -- Kate Wilhelm
(Asimov's, Nov 23)
__ No Award
Best Novelette
__ "The Quickening" -- Michael Bishop (Universe 11)
__ "The Thermals of August" -- Ed Bryant (F&SF, May)
__ "The Fire When It Comes" -- Parke Godwin (F&SF, May)
__ "Guardians" -- George R. R. Martin (Analog, Oct 12)
__ "Unicorn Variation" -- Roger Zelazny (Asimov's, Apr 13)
__ No Award
Best Short Story
__ "The Quiet" -- George Florance-Guthridge (F&SF, July)
__ "Absent Thee from Felicity Awhile" -- Somtow Sucharitkul
(Analog, Sept 14)
__ "The Pusher" -- John Varley (F&SF, Oct)
__ "The Woman the Unicorn Loved" -- Gene Wolfe (Asimov's, June 8)
__ No Award
Best Nonfiction Book
__ Anatomy of Wonder -- ed. Neil Barron (Bowker)
__ After Man -- Dougal Dixon (Macmillan)
__ Danse Macabre -- Stephen King (Everest)
__ The Grand Tour -- Ron Miller and William K. Hartman (Workman)
__ The Art of Leo & Diane Dillon -- ed. Byron Preiss (Ballantine)
__ No Award
Best Professional Editor
__ Terry Carr
__ Edward L. Ferman
__ David G. Hartwell
__ Stanley Schmidt
__ George Scithers
__ No Award
Best Professional Artist
__ Vincent DiFate
__ Carl Lundgren
__ Don Maitz
__ Rowena Morrill
__ Michael Whelan
__ No Award
Best Dramatic Presentation
__ Dragonslayer
__ Excalibur
__ Outland
__ Raiders of the Lost Ark
__ Time Bandits
__ No Award
Best Fanzine
__ File 770 -- Michael Glyer
__ Locus -- Charles N. Brown
__ SF Chronicle -- Andrew Porter
__ SF Review -- Richard E. Geis
__ SF-LOVERS Digest -- Jim McGrath (Just kidding gang) [ Drat! - Jim ]
__ No Award
Best Fan Writer
__ Richard E. Geis
__ Michael Glyer
__ Arthur Hlavaty
__ Dave Langford
__ No Award
Best Fan Artist
__ Alexis Gilliland
__ Joan Hanke-Woods
__ Victoria Poyser
__ William Rotsler
__ Stu Shiffman
__ No Award
John W. Campbell Award
__ David Brin
__*Alexis Gilliland
__ Robert Stallman (deceased)
__ Michael Swanwick
__*Paul O. Williams
__ No Award
* eligible again next year
If enough interest is expressed, I will collect and tally your votes
for the hugo winners. (Maybe the digest can take out a membership in
the Worldcon and vote like NESFA (New England Science Fiction Society)
does each year.) Votes will be kept confidential. The FINAL deadline
will be JULY 15, which gives you almost two months.
Voting in done on an Australian Ballot system, i.e. rank by number
(1st choice, 2nd choice, etc) up to and including No Award. Winners
will be announced sometime in August.
Greg
[ Thanks Greg for typing this all in! If anyone is interested in
having a straw Hugo poll of the readership, please send mail to
Greg. If we have enough interested parties, we'll do something
about it. -- Jim ]
------------------------------
Date: 16 May 1982 1133-PDT
From: Phil Gerring
Subject: Movie review: Conan The Barbarian
Pico-review: Made in Japan
Nano-review: Any resemblance to characters, living or dead, created by
Robert E. Howard (et al.) is purely coincidental.
Micro-review: If you're a Conan fan and expect to see him on the
screen, expect some disappointment. Otherwise, it's an OK (barely)
swords and sorcery/samaurai movie without much in the way of sorcery.
Worth going to see, but the word is that The Sword and the Sorcerer
(which I've not seen yet) has upstaged it considerably and is a better
movie.
Macro-review: We kept expecting the dialogue to be in Japanese with
subtitles; some of the scenes appear to be loosely based on Conan
stories (e.g., The Thing in the Crypt, The Tower of the Elephant), but
many of the weapons, armor, fighting techniques, symbols, and overall
impressions had a strongly Japanese flavor. The antagonist, Thulsa
Doom, was indeed a Howard character, but in the King Kull stories...
The general flavor of the movie is Conan et al. vs. mostly human
antagonists, while that of the books is more Conan vs. mostly
supernatural monsters.
Many of the scenes were rather inexplicable--I kept wondering
what the heck was going on. The first part of the movie was mostly
disconnected scenes with Conan being the only common point (which is
to say, the plot is very weak). After we manage to meet all of the
good guys and bad guys, we finally have a quest to save a beautiful
princess from the evil sorcerer, which starts to tie things together.
The special effects were straightforward and well-done, with the
best part being a fight with some kind of air elementals or demons or
some such (it wasn't entirely clear just what was going on). The
first part managed to avoid being unnecessarily bloody, but this was
rectified later (I DON'T recommend this for kids...). One point
worthy of mention is that this is the first movie of the genre to have
a female who handles weaponry with more than adequate skill.
Summary: Pretend the title is The Three Samaurai, ignore some of the
disconnectedness, and it's definitely worth seeing once.
------------------------------
Date: 15 May 1982 16:49-EDT (Saturday)
From: Mijjil (Matthew J. Lecin)
Reply-to: Lecin at RU-GREEN
Subject: The Secret of NIMH
Am I to assume that this "animated feature", "The Secret of NIMH" is
that wonderful old book "Mrs. Frisbee and the Rats of the NIMH?"
(It would be FANTASTIC if it was...) (TAKE THE KIDS.)
{Mijjil}
------------------------------
Date: 17 May 1982 1849-EDT
From: Thomas Galloway
Subject: ST-TWOK ending (not a spoiler, but refers to one tangently)
There are always two ways to interpret the comment, "the audience
applauded the end of the movie"...
tom
------------------------------
Date: 17 May 1982 07:21-EDT
From: James M. Turner
Subject: ROTJ is to VMS as...
Just to put it in perspective:
Waiting for ROTJ is-
72 times worse than waiting for the next analog
(36 times the time and twice the cliffhangers)
150 times worse than waiting for the next Instant Message.
(75 times the wait, and twice the cliffhangers)
6 times worse than waiting for the next Elfquest
(12 times the wait, but only 1/2 the cliffhangers)
Equal with the Hugo winners
(3 times the wait, but 1/3 the cliffhangers)
1/2 as bad as waiting for a new VMS release
(Twice the wait, but 1/4 the cliffhangers [remember,
it's your JOB!])
oo times as bad as waiting for a new Heinlein book
(twice the wait, and who cares anyway)
1/oo times as bad as waiting to see if Regan goes away (equal
wait, but it's only a movie, we got Vadar in the White House!)
And 1/oo^2 times as bad as waiting for the con that's next week,
and your boss just dumped a ton of make-work on your desk, and
the tape drive's dead and...
James
Note: Any political statements made are those of the author's evil
persona that creeps out a 6 am on out-of-phase days and causes
trouble. If you don't like it, fill in your favorite liberal and
elected office.
------------------------------
Date: 16 May 1982 0017-PDT (Sunday)
From: lauren at UCLA-Security (Lauren Weinstein)
Subject: Battlestar Dyslexia
I don't remember all of those time/space units they used in that
loser... but I do remember something that popped up in the first few
minutes that definitely set the mood of the series for me.
The "good guys" were being chased by the Du Pont Crylons. The baddies
were getting close. One of our heroes ejaculated a line like: "We'd
better do something, they're only 4 microns behind us, and gaining!"
Yeah, I thought, they'd better do something REALLY fast. Microns.
Cretins.
--Lauren--
------------------------------
Date: 17-May-82 12:12PM-EDT (Mon)
From: David Miller
Subject: Battelstar Galactica Units
In the TV series of Battelstar Galactica the following
units were used to describe space and time:
BG | Terran equivalent:
----------------------------------
micron | second
centon | minute
yarn | year
No units for distance were ever used except for one
horrible reference to parsec, where they men A.U..
Distances were handled in the manner of light yarns
and fighter microns (i.e. the distance a fighter
travels in a micron) This is the reason expressions
like "Wait just one micron!" and "Cylons are thirty
microns away" This last line always caused me to
envision a Cylon with his blaster stuck firmly into
the speakers back.
The best reference to Earth units is in the late
season episodes where they take aboard a Space
Shuttle. After it escapes and is followed back to
its home planet TERRA, one of the occupants tells
Starbuck to "hold on for a minute" whereupon Starbuck
looks around for something to grab onto and replies
"A what?"
Personally the whole deal with the units struck me
as a bunch of feldacarp.
Dave
(miller@yale)
------------------------------
Date: 15 May 1982 1402-PDT
From: Mark Crispin
Reply-to: Admin.MRC at SU-SCORE
Subject: Foonlys at Stanford
There is only one Foonly at Stanford, an F2 at the CCRMA Lab (the
computer music folks). The SU-AI processor is not, nor has it ever
been, a Foonly, prototype or otherwise. In particular, it is not the
common prototype for a Foonly or DEC KL-10 that Phil Gerring
describes. It is an early production model DEC KL-1080 model A CPU,
somewhere between revision level 8 and current KL's. The differences
between it and modern KL's can be attributed to its older packaging,
not keeping it up to revision level, and modifications of dubious
value made to the hardware and microcode at Stanford.
When the "super-Foonly" project folded at Stanford, some of the
people involved went to DEC; and portions of the design of the super-
Foonly became the base for the KL-10 design. The DEC prints labelled
as being drawn by "S. Foonly" are not indicative of this; rather the
early KL prints were drawn without anything in the "drawn by" box.
Somebody lawyer or marketing person or something (I never got a
straight story on who) got all upset and said there had to be
SOMETHING there. Nobody could remember who did what (remember they
were using SUDS, back in the days when CAD was a new idea) so as a
joke they put in "S. Foonly" in all the prints.
Stanford's contribution to the KL-10 effort was recognized and
rewarded by DEC, which is why we got one of the early KL-10s. Other
individuals in the super-Foonly group at Stanford got together after a
while and eventually did build Foonlys. A KL-10 and a Foonly are two
entirely different processors; the old super-Foonly designs at
Stanford were just a small (but important) part of the KL-10.
------------------------------
Date: 16 May 1982 1134-PDT
From: Phil Gerring
Subject: Duplicate digests, Foonlys
Hey, SFL #50 broke a record for number of copies received: I got no
less than eleven (previous record was six). I like SFL, but do you
realize how much it costs me to store eleven copies for even just a
day??!
MRC's comments on Foonlys and 10s are undoubtedly more accurate than
mine, mine being based on oral tradition and his on (apparently)
research and/or personal experience. So much for oral tradition in
the technological world...
------------------------------
End of SF-LOVERS Digest
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