From: utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!sf-lovers Newsgroups: fa.sf-lovers Title: SF-LOVERS Digest V7 #1 Article-I.D.: ucbvax.7867 Posted: Fri Jul 2 04:06:24 1982 Received: Sat Jul 3 01:26:36 1982 >From JPM@Mit-Ai Fri Jul 2 04:04:00 1982 SF-LOVERS Digest Friday, 2 Jul 1982 Volume 7 : Issue 1 Today's Topics: SF Fandom - Chicon IV, SF Books - The Deceivers & The Eureka Years & Where Time Winds Blow & The Jade Enchantress & Ellison & The Number of the Beast & "All the Lies That Are My Life", SF Topics - SF Ghetto & Politics in SF, Random Topics - Movie ratings ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: 14 Jun 82 20:54:22 EDT (Mon) From: Steve BellovinSubject: "The Deceivers" "The Deceivers", by Alfred Bester, bills itself as "the true successor to THE STARS MY DESTINATION." It isn't; rather, it's the true prequel to Thanksgiving, in that it's a real turkey. The writing style is very free-flowing, the characters are improbable, and the plot even more so. It's filled with blatant and offensive racial and ethnic stereotypes, and the "science" makes no sense at all. But the part likely to offend everyone on this list is a computer-query sequence. Think about it -- it's the 27th century, the computers are semi-sentient and talk among themselves. So, when the hero wants to ask his computer (via an EEG-like link) where his true love is, he says "'Program Problem APB Demi Jeroux Print Absolute Address.'... He know that 'an absolute address' in computer circles demanded the exact storage location where the referenced operand is to be found, and no weaseling before, behind, between, above, below and out of the imperative." Worse than that, the program is in BASIC! (A partial listing is included....) Well, I'm not going to object to Bester buying himself a micro. Nor do I object to it influencing his stories. But he should try to do a better job of it. Never mind -- the book isn't worth even this much space in the Digest; I'm only bothering in the hope of sparing other fans of "The Stars My Destination" and "The Demolished Man" from wading through this. --Steve Bellovin University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill ------------------------------ Date: 27 Jun 82 2:20-PDT From: mclure at SRI-UNIX Subject: sf column SCIENCE FICTION By Roland J. Green (c) 1982 Chicago Sun-Times (Field News Service) Opinions differ about how old science fiction is. Some aggressive types would enroll Homer and Plato among the founding fathers. Others prefer Mary Shelley (''Frankenstein'') or Hugo Gernsback (Amazing Stories magazine). Few deny that SF has a considerable history. ''The Eureka Years,'' edited by Annette McComas (Bantam paperback, $3.50), is a valuable contribution to recording that history. In 1949 the late J. Francis McComas and Anthony Boucher founded the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in Eureka, Calif. During the first five years until McComas' retirement in 1954, F&SF was probably the most innovative magazine in the field. It discovered or developed at least a baker's dozen of new writers, including Richard Matheson, the late Philip K. Dick, Zenna Henderson, Poul Anderson and Gordon Dickson, as well as extensively publishing already established writers such as L. Sprague de Camp, Theodore Sturgeon and Ray Bradbury. The book itself is an assortment of stories, articles, correspondence, and anecdotes by the editor, McComas' widow. Many of the stories are already well-known (what respectable SF collection does not have Sturgeon's ''The Hurkle is a Happy Beast''?) or significant mostly for what the authors later became. On the other hand, there is also a virtually unknown Andre Norton story and Manly Wade Wellman's first John the Minstrel story, among other treasures. In fact, describing this book rapidly becomes a repetition of ''among other treasures'' because it is so filled with them. There are lists of each year's prominent books, in which novels this reviewer grew up on are hailed as new breakthroughs; one notes that a whole year in the early 1950s might produce less published SF than a couple of months in any year since 1978! There are familiar complaints about how poor distribution is afflicting sales. There is a section of rejection letters any would-be SF writer or teacher of SF writing ought to memorize religiously. This book, in short, records a notable achievement as well as an act of faith in the future of American SF when that future was by no means assured. The days when such acts were laying the foundations of SF are rapidly slipping out of living memory; they badly need recording in more books like this one. It would be an oversimplification to call Robert Holdstock's ''Where Time Winds Blow'' (TimescapePocket Books, $2.95 paperback) a ''typical British SF novel.'' However, the emphasis on characterization, the literate savoring of language, and the somewhat uncertain pacing all seem to be found more often in SF novels that start their career on the far side of the Atlantic. Holdstock, nonetheless, has made a good book of his two interwoven stories. One story tells the search for the secret of the Time Winds, fierce cyclonic storms that sweep across a far-distant planet's surface and snatch cities, machines, and researchers across time. The other story is the complex relationship of three of these researchers, two men and a woman. They emerge both as believable in terms of their own society and understandable by the book's 20th century readers. In E. Hoffman Price's graceful fantasy ''The Jade Enchantress'' (Del ReyBallantine, $2.75 paperback), a minor Chinese goddess begins the story by seeking a mortal lover, a shrewd young farmer. Price tells what follows with wit, sympathy for all his characters, a profound knowledge of T'ang Dynasty China that never slows the brisk pacing, and a delightful savoring of Chinese philosophy, sexual mores, magic and cuisine. Along with Price's ''The Devil Wives of Li Fong'' (also a Ballantine paperback), this book recalls the Judge Dee mysteries of Robert Van Gulik - an extraordinarily effective use of another time and culture to bring a whole new dimension to an existing genre. This year Chicago plays host to the annual World Science Fiction Convention Sept. 2-6 at the Hyatt Regency Chicago. Guests of honor are Australian writer A. Bertram Chandler, American artist Frank Kelly Freas, and longtime SF fan Lee Hoffman. Memberships are $50 through July 15; thereafter $75 at the door. Write Chicon IV, Box A3120, Chicago, Ill. 60690. ------------------------------ Date: Wed 30-Jun-1982 10:40-EDT From: Bill Russell Subject: The Number of the Beast I just heard an ad on the radio (WNEW-FM 102.7) for this book by Heinlein. It was described as a "new" best-selling mass market paperback, and as "wicked and wonderfull"! This is the first time that I can remember that a SF book has been advertised on radio. Has anyone else heard this ad? ------------------------------ Date: 1 Jul 1982 19:04:47 EDT (Thursday) From: Ralph Muha Subject: Ellison's Accident In one of his recent stories, "All The Lies That Are My Life", Ellison tells the tale of an SF author who leaves a videotape will. In the story, the author is killed in an automobile accident on an LA freeway... ------------------------------ Date: 18 Jun 1982 03:54:19-PDT From: decvax!duke!uok!jejones at Berkeley Subject: Anthony Villiers Hmm...I thought that Anthony Villiers was a character (murder victim?) in the Wendell Urth story "The Dying Night", in *Asimov's Mysteries*. James Jones duke!uok!jejones (formerly ihuxl!jej) [ This message is in reference to the contribution in volume 5, issue 63, describing Anthony Villiers as a character in a series by Alexei Panshin. -- Jim ] ------------------------------ Date: 28 June 1982 14:32 est From: Spratt.Multics at MIT-MULTICS Subject: Fantasy and Science Fiction authors who hate F&SF. I recall Harlan Ellison making desperate efforts to dissociate himself from the SF genre in which he had been so successful. At the time I thought it a curious and singular abberation. Recently, however, I ran across a couple of SF authors who have put themselves into an even more curious (but related) position. They are active SF genre authors who seem to think no one (but themselves, I suppose) writes SF worth reading. The first of these I read was George Zebrowski's Macrolife. It's a well-written book with a theme encompassing all of time and space. In the afterword, Zebrowski explains where the ideas for the book came from and in the course of this explanation quotes from an essay titled "Science Fiction is Too Conservative", written in 1961 by everybody's favorite futurist, G. Harry Stine. The gist of the quotation is that most of the really innovative speculation is done outside of the SF genre. Zebrowsky goes on to affirm this and state that the situation is even worse "today" than it was in 1961 (adding a gratuitous "I'm sorry to say"). The strong implication he makes is that his book, Macrolife, is different from what everybody else is writing in SF in that it does speculate innovatively. The second book is titled "The Golden Nagimata", and it's written by Jessical Amanda Salmonson (I'm not sure of the spelling on the name). She makes her remarks in an afterword, as well. Her view is that writers of Fantasy and Science Fiction don't write stories which are "rich" and "interesting". She says that, as she desires to write stories which are interesting, she doesn't allow other SF authors to influence her. The one thing I find really curious in all of this is that I enjoyed the writings of all three authors. ------------------------------ Date: 28 Jun 82 13:00-PDT From: mclure at SRI-UNIX Subject: Re: Fantasy and Science Fiction authors who hate F&SF. If you've read enough of Harlan's non-fiction/intros/etc and followed him for awhile, you'll see that it is completely reasonable for him to hate being pigeon-holed. In fact, it is his trademark to complain about such things. Mainstream authors have done similar things. Vladimir Nabokov was ruthlessly anti-critic. He urged that only his readers should try to interpret his work. Harlan is a versatile author, capable of producing excellent work in fantasy, SF, horror, mainstream, and mixings of the genres. I don't see a reason why his books should always appear in the SF section of the bookstore. ------------------------------ Date: 28 June 1982 16:32 est From: Spratt.Multics at MIT-MULTICS Subject: Re: Fantasy and Science Fiction authors who hate F&SF. I guess I failed to make the major thrust of my note clear. I'm not so interested in yet another go around of justifications for Ellison's position. The more extreme (and arrogant) situation which Zebrowsky and Salmonson place themselves in is what I find fascinating. In fact, I neglected to state the question which all of this was a lead-up to: What other authors have stated similar positions? Certainly, Ellison's position is not particularly similar in that I don't re-call him stating that he was the only (or even one of the very few) who wrote "good" SF. It \has/ struck me as odd that he, alone out of a large number of authors, is so strident in his renunciation of SF-authordom. Certainly other authors have "suffered" from being narrowly categorized in SF. L. Sprague de Camp's historical fiction must have a much smaller audience than it would if he weren't known only as an SF author. Asimov, while quite famous as an SF author, seems to have done fairly well in both the Mystery and Science Fact genres, without recourse to bitter soliloquies on current practices in the publishing industry. Other, admittedly less potent, examples of quietly multi-faceted authors come to mind involving Bradbury, LeGuin, and Wolfe. It just occurred to me that Vonnegut made some comments about dissociating himself from SF. So, for my second question, did K. Vonnegut make such comments, and if so, what did he say? Yours in contentiousness, Lindsey Leroy Spratt. ------------------------------ Date: 10 Jun 1982 22:26:14-EDT From: csin!cjh at CCA-UNIX Subject: Re: political SF Oh goody, another topic to flame on! To begin with, I was just as disgusted as APPLE at the item I read concerning the attempt of a group to produce [progressive SF]. It is much too broad to say that politics makes bad fiction; let's try modifying that to read "codified politics makes bad fiction". I can't answer for all of the writers nominated by Minow, but I would observe that in all of their works that I am familiar with the quality is related to the subordination of [politics] to plot. Shaw's best material, for instance, reflects individual human concerns; the pieces that try to follow any political \doctrine/ are frequently awkward and dull. (Similarly, Sturgeon claims not to have originated the remark that Wells sold his birthright for a pot of message.) This is true even of Brunner; when he tries to get a message across, he gets boring. The thing that particularly appalled me about this group (Red Shift, I think they called themselves---what an obviously one-sided name) is that their public utterances, as quoted, show a severe ignorance of much of SF. To consider Heinlein, Asimov, and Doc Smith as representative of the whole field (and to call Asimov a militarist!) is show the shallowness of one's knowledge. ------------------------------ Date: 27 Jun 1982 1404-EDT From: John R. Covert Subject: R-13 How do you tell the difference between a 12- and a 13-year-old? Few of them, except military dependents, have any form of identification. R isn't enforced very well either, but R-13 would be unenforceable unless the movie industry wanted to issue ID cards. The whole system is voluntary, anyway. R seems to vary between "under 16 and under 18" not allowed from place to place, anyway. Does anyone know if any towns/states have ordinances/laws requiring theatres to enforce the R-limit? [ This message is in reference to the contribution in volume 5, issue 63, on the controversy surrounding the rating of the movie Poltergeist -- Jim ] ------------------------------ End of SF-LOVERS Digest ***********************