RIVERSIDE QUARTERLY August 1975 Vol. 6, No. 3 (whole number 23) Editors Leland Sapiro RQ Miscellany Associate Editor: Jim Harmon Fiction Editor: Redd Boggs Poetry Editor: Sheryl Smith Assistant Editors: Art Editor: Jan Jonsson Bill Blackbeard, Jon White Copyright Slugfest: Round One Send poetry to Sheryl Smith, 13)4-6 W. Howard St, Chicago, IL 60626; fiction to Redd Boggs, Box 1111, Berkeley, CA 9U7O1; and send all The trouble started last summer in the UCLA bookstore. Browsing other correspondence to Box 14U51 Univ. Sta., Gainesville, FL 32601],. through The Many Worlds of Poul Anderson, edited by Roger Elwood, and, in particular, an article,"Challenge and Response," I felt that old sensation of having done this some time before. The reason soon TABLE OF CONTENTS became clear: Challenge was a reprint (slightly expanded) from the 1l;th issue of my own magazine. That evening I complained to my bro­ RQ Miscellany............... .................................................................. 179 ther Stanley (a lawyer), who sent to the publishers, Chilton Books, a letter pointing out that RQ was a copyrighted magazine from which The Atrocity Exhibition......................Nick Perry & Roy Wilkie....180 something had been reprinted without permission. Flying Saucers Attack Ohio................. ...Louis Phillips................... 189 It should be noted here that previous RQ reprints caused no trouble, Lazarus, Come Forth from That Torabl..,Joe Christopher...................190 since each author or publisher (with one exception) had asked permis­ sion, and everybody that asked, received--e.g., Alexei Panshin, Heinlein The Promise................................ Christens Cosgriffe Meyers.198 in Dimension (Advent), Jack Williamson, H.G. Wells: Critic of Progress The Translator................. .....................Fredric Matteson.......................199 (Mirage), and Kris Neville, "The Outcasts" (New Worlds'^ MF: A Separable Meaning..................... ..Jean Kennard...........................200 After spending the rest of the summer in semi-tranquility, I return­ ed to Florida. Here I was jolted by a friend, Mike Everling, who Mid-Winter............................Douglas Barbour...........................207 showed me a letter, from a Rhode Island fan (Don D’Ammassa), inquiring Jtohoutek Falling........................................ about a widespread rumour that I was suing the article's author, Sandra Miesel. Because Sandra had been a personal friend, my shock was that of A Friend of the Indians Gets His Facts Wrong...... somebody who learns that a scandal sheet had credited him with a plot .......Richard Brenzo......... ....208 . to murder his sister. I wrote Sandra to ask if she had heard this sto­ The Red and the White....................... ..Yogi Borel.....................................21.’ ry, and got from her lawyer, Larry Propp, a direct answer plus an open letter (saying essentially the same things), presumably to be sent to Speaking Worlds to Each Other.........Douglas Barbour...................... 213 various fan editors: Take Twenty...........................................Darrel Schweitzer...................215 It has come to my attention that the rumor is circulating through­ Pulp on the Rocks............................................... Steven Dimeo..............................217 out fandom that Leland Sapiro has sued Sandra Miesel. As of/this/ date...the rumor is false...Although Leland has never directly Silent City...........................Errol Miller..................................219 threatened suit against Sandra, the net effect...would be to force From a Corner Table at Rough House’s............. Sandra to defend. When Sandra sold the revised article to Elwood, The Endless Art............................................Bill Blackboard............................ 220 a part of her contract was an indemnity agreement. Elwood signed a similar clause...in his contract with Chilton. If Leland sues Opere Citato..........................Harry Warner..................... 229 Chilton, Chilton will file a third-party action against Roger El­ The Seasonal Fan...... wood. • .Elwood would quite properly third-party Sandra...To squelch The Untold Story of the Wolf Man...Jim Harmon................... 232 all rumor, let me repeat that Leland has never directly threatened to sue Sandra... Theatre of the Fantastic...... Truckin’ through Munchkin Land.....Peter Bernhardt........................ 237 My answer to Larry Propp was this: Balloon......... .............Tracy Smith.....................................239 Roger Elwood did wrong in reprinting a copyrighted article without asking permission. You know this, I know it—and Roger Elwood knows Selected Letters.......................................................................................................... 2I4.O it. Sandra Miesel’s being forced to sign an indemnity clause—so she could be sued in case Elwood was sued—strikes me as just a (Unsigned material is by the editor.) cover-up...If copyright laws had been followed, no such indemnity clause would have been necessary...Before, I'd have settled out of Cover: Pat Hodgell ("A Voyage to Arcturus") court for a relatively modest sum: now I have to ask the maximum in order to be able to compensate Mrs. Miesel in case she actually is sued. Steven Utley.......182, 1B5 DEA....................................... 218 At that time I was unaware that an indemnity clause is standard in Marc Schirmeister..192, 19U Harry Habblitz.............229, 232, 21;0 all such publishing contracts—and I also was unprepared for the bogus Mike Everling.............202, 205 Jan Jonsson.........231 self-righteousness of the amateur press. Thus Linda Bushyager’s Harass ran a headline, "Leland Sapiro Sues Sandra Miesel" and pontificated, Mary Ann Emerson...210 Al Satian.........................23U> 235, 236 "Fans may wish to cancel RQ subs or otherwise show disapproval," while Cy Chauvin.........211], Peter Bernhardt.......... 238 Dick Geis (The Alien Critic) stated, "Until further information surfaces 1 will have no further comment"—and then proceeded to comment: "I do not at this time think very much of Leland Sapiro. But, then, I have never thought much of RQ." Of course, it was easy to guess the rumour's The number after your name on the mailing label indicates the source. As 1 wrote Stanley, "This entire whispering campaign must issue (this being number 23) on which your subscription expires. have originated in Roger Elwood's office, since he and his Canadian pub­ Subscription rate: $2.00 /four issues; back issues are 60/ each. lisher were the only ones to know of your original letter." Copyright 1975 by Leland Sapiro. (continued on outside back cover) 180 THE ATROCITY EXHIBITION 101 "Yes, in effect they're the same character, but their role in the stories is not to be characters in the sense that Scobie, let's say, or any other character in the retrospective novel is a character, an identifiable human being rather like those The Atrocity Exhibition we recognise among our friends, acquaintances, and so on." by (p. *7) But, of course, in this case, informing us of what the character is not, is not very helpful in explaining in what sense they are chsrr Nick Perry and Roy Wilkie acters. Later in the interview Ballard explains the following passage: of .Siratkclydej Kodachrome. Captain Kirby, M15 studied the prints. They showed: (1) a thick-set man in an Air Force jacket, unshaven face half-hidden by the dented hat-peak; (2) a transverse sec­ tion through the spinal level T-12; (3) a crayon self-portrait by David Feary, a seven-year-old schizophrenic at the Belmont In 1970 Ballard published in the United Kingdom The Atrocity Asylum, Sutton; (4) radio-spectra from the quasar CTA 102; (5) Exhibition (Jonathan Cape, London). We are informed that sections an antero-nosterior radiograph of a skull, estimated capacity of the book had already appeared in such journals as Ambit, En­ 1,500 c.c.; (6) spectro-heliogram of the sun taken with the K counter, ICA Eyentsheet, International Times, and Transatlantic^ Re­ line of calcium; (7) left and right hand-prints showing mas­ view, which would at least indicate that Ballard was seeking a wider sive scarring between second and third metacarpal bones. To Dr. or different, audience for his short stories. Secondly,, the idio­ Nathan he said: "And all these make up one picture?" ^g^ syncratic style Ballard was developing in The Terminal Beach and The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a downhill Ballard holds that: Motor Race is now confirmed into a format where paragraphs are ti­ tled, incidents described apparently at random, and characters be­ "They make up a composite portrait of this man's identity. In have in strange ways without being strongly located. And whereas this story I was examining the particular role that a twenti­ The Wind from Nowhere, The Drowned World, and The Crystal World have eth-century Messiah might take,in the context of mid-twentieth a conventional layout, one can, with the advantage of hindsight, century life, and I feel that he would reappear in a whole se­ identify the beginnings of this formal innovation in The Drought ries of aspects and relationships, touching an enormous range (The Burning World, in the U.S. and Canada). Its 42 chapters pro­ of events; that he wouldn't have a single identity, in the vide a clear constrast to the other novels, which are of similar sense that Jesus had—he would have a whole multiplex of con­ length