Sense of Wonder Stories 3, December 2009 (13 months late) is edited and published by Rich Coad, 2132 Berkeley Drive, Santa Rosa, CA 95401. e-mail: [email protected] Wondertorial......................................... ........................................page 3 ! Editorial natterings by Rich Coad The Super Scientifiction of Homer Eon Flint.................................page 7 ! Randy Byers on a seminal SF figure H.G. Wells" Forgotten Novelette: #The Croquet Player"................page 11 ! Graham Charnock on obscure Wells B.E.M.S, Babes and Brushes: Chesley Bonestell .......................page 13 ! Bruce Townley has a new column about great SF artists Call Him Mr. Nice Guy: The Stories of Dean McLaughlin............page 18 Art: ! Peter Weston on an underrated SF author Front and Back Cover: Nikola Tesla"s Wardenclyffe Tower...............................................page 23 Steve Stiles ! Bill Burns on technology that might have been Page 13: The Readers Write.......................................................................page 28 Jay Kinney ! To get SF fans talking SF simply mention Heinlein Page 18: Forward To The Past: A Report to Shareholders.........................page 37 Photo by Andrew I. Porter; ! Roy Kettle, OBE, on the mighty SoWS publishing empire all rights reserved. Great Science Fiction Editors........................................inside back cover Page 37: ! Ted White: Amazing & Fantastic Collage by Stacy Scott WONDERTORIAL Like many Science Fiction fans I have issues It was at Helicon II, an Eastercon in Jersey, that with that other genre with which SF is eternally I noticed an oddly named book.* The 13 1/2 bound in the public mind and the bookstore Lives of Captain Bluebear. Flipping through the shelves: Fantasy. The very word itself conjures book I was immediately struck by the up revolting pictures of appallingly cute unicorns typographical tricks that had words gaining size and elves in their forest green shifts with slightly as volume increased, the illustrations of odd pointy ears and pointy-toed shoes. There"s large hairy monsters and multi,-brained almost bound to be some faux-medieval professors, the side-bar text that provided a political structure with kings and aristocrats running index of the work, and chapters with abounding. Dwarves will be rough and tumble titles like “My Life in the Dimensional Hiatus”. Falstaffian figures - eager to drink and fight and Hell, it was only a couple of pounds, and it stay altogether rather dim. Magic will figure looked intriguing, so why not give it a try? prominently and provide an easy out for authors who have written themselves into a corner. And When I finally got around to reading it I found yet it wasn"t always this way. Fantasy used to that a German writer named Walter Moers had produce works like Gormenghast, The Worm created a wholly captivating continent named Ouroboros, Alice In Wonderland. It was, in fact, Zamonia, which somehow takes up much of the a genre limited only by the imagination of the space between North America and Europe without us noticing, filled with all manner of nonsensical but intelligent lifeforms none of whom are in any way archetypal or representative of some imagined ideal way of life. These are lifeforms like the titular Captain Bluebear, perhaps the only Bluebear alive anywhere, who finds himself not born so much as thrust into the midst of a first adventure by becoming aware he is at sea, in a walnut shell, approaching a fierce maelstrom which will surely end his days pretty soon. But bluebears, it develops, have 27 lives and in this book, this demi-autobiography, Captain Bluebear relates his first 13 1/2. Rescued from the Malmstrom (actually somewhat worse than a maelstrom) by mini-pirates, who find the walnut-shell ensconced bear large, our hero gets to relate his further lives with hob-goblins, escaping a giant spider, dealing with rickshaw demons, author, a far broader field than the seemingly sailing on a ship with 1,000 funnels, sinking into circumscribed pasture that is permitted these cogitating quicksand, and crossing the Valley of days. So it was with some delight that I came Discarded Ideas. Well, that"s a small sample, at across the German author Walter Moers, an out any rate, of what Bluebear encounters in the and out fantasy author who is published as first half of his lives. Needless to say, he hopes “literature” and will be found away from those fervently for the next 13 1/2 lives to be quiet, shelved marked “Fantasy and Science Fiction”. interrupted by nothing more exciting than supper. looking for rare TRUE FIRSTS to sell to the I wasn"t sure, even after finishing the book, rabid collectors; and critics available for-hire. In whether this was intended to be a children"s short, a city of fandom, more or less. Naturally book or not. At 702 pages, it certainly seemed one of the sneaky, underhanded, back-biting large for a children"s book and there were some agents drugs our hero (using a toxic tome) and genuinely scary bits in those pages. But JK strands him in the catacombs where he is Rowling writes books as lengthy and Diana pursued by bookhunters and encounters many Wynne Jones can be as frightening. Perhaps whimsical an frightening creatures, not least the Moers" natural audience is teenagers who enjoy Fearsome Booklings, each of whom spends Rowling and Jones, yet he is stocked in the their life memorizing and studying a single General Fiction section of bookstores, not over book. Wordplay abounds throughout this there with the young adult fiction. exuberant novel and the names of many of the literary canon find themselves anagramized into Despite the peripatetic nature of Captain funnier names of Zamonian authors. Bluebear, Moers was not through with exploring Zamonia. Three additional volumes have been It"s so refreshing that fantasy hasn"t been published which, in addition to location, share entirely drained of imagination. some characters such as the four-brained Professor Nightingale and the grub-shark (basically a cross between a shark and a maggot) Volzotan Smyke. Rumo & His Miraculous Adventures is the tale of a young Wolperting"s (more or less a dog with antlers and VERY sharp teeth) coming of age and his ultimate rescue of all his ilk from the dark forces of the netherworld, led by an insane king who cannot relate either to the common folk or their common speech: “The nommoc flok? Since when have I neeb esterinted in the nommoc flok"s iponions?” By turns funny and bloody this is a tour-de-farce of quest adventures. But the book that most fans are likely to appreciate the most is The City of Dreaming Books. Optimus Yarnspinner is a young dinosaur with literary aspirations. When I say young, I mean about 80, and when I say dinosaur, I mean the last living descendants of the dinosaurs that roamed the Earth in the Jurassic age. Intelligent, industrious, and, above all, literate dinosaurs. Anyways, this young dino inherits a manuscript of such masterful prose, each sentence a pearl, every paragraph a diamond, that he sets off for Bookholm, the City of Dreaming Books, to find the author and anything else he may have written. In Bookholm he encounters not so much the refined, elegant, literary aesthetes of his imagination but rabid collectors of first editions; slimy, sneaky, back-stabbing literary agents; bookhunters who trawl the catacombs The fantasy field lost one of its best current I have to say that I am really pleased with this practitioners on November 29, 2009. Robert issue of SoWS. It"s got the mix of contents I Holdstock is surely best known for Mythago was hoping to get from the initial issue: a bit of Wood a novel for which he won the World odd technology, some historical perspective, an Fantasy Award. Amongst fans in Britain, appreciation of an under-appreciated author, an though, he may be even better known for his article on one of the best illustrators the field ebullient personality, friendliness, and general has produced, and some excellent artwork from love of life. This is easily seen in the many Messrs. Stiles and Kinney. Of course it has photos that have been appearing on various taken far too long to get the actual production web sites since his death - there"s always a completed. I have taken steps, though, and smile, a genuine smile full of happiness and next year THINGS WILL BE DIFFERENT. See, zest that is never forced, and a twinkle in the right there, at the very tippy top of my New eye that the camera cannot fail to catch. Years resolution list, before even the perennial favorite of lose weight, is produce at least two I only really knew Rob socially for about a year, issues of Sense of Wonder Stories. and that was 35 years ago, but he made a great impression. I can only imagine how those who One of the necessary ingredients for producing have been close to Rob for many years must fanzines is, of course, material. I have on hand feel. 61 is far too young an age for such a a good piece from Ned Brooks about working wonderful writer and wonderful human being to as a test engineer for NASA through its glory die. days. But I need more. So if you"re feeling like writing that analysis of socio-cultural groups in Alastair Reynolds" Revelation Space universe, or an in-depth look at the final works of Thomas M. Disch, reviews of Mike Ashley"s multi-volume The Hugo Awards, especially the Fan Hugos, history of SF magazines, or a review of are something that the fanzine fan community Spacehounds of the IPC, please do so and loves to gripe about each year as news of the send it my way.