Captain Flashback
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CAPTAIN FLASHBACK A fanzine composed for the 415th distribution of the Turbo-Charged Party-Animal Amateur Press Our Timelines, Ourselves: Association, from the joint membership of Andy Reading Recursion by Blake Crouch Hooper and Carrie Root, residing at 11032 30th Blake Crouch is a consummate pro, and if a Ave. NE Seattle, WA 98125. E-mail Andy at Hollywood casting director wanted a writer [email protected], and you may reach Carrie at who looks like a young science fiction [email protected]. This is a Drag Bunt Press Production, completed on 1/20/2021. professional, Blake’s head shot would be on top of the pile. He has the glasses, the nerdy CAPTAIN FLASHBACK is devoted to old fanzines, haircut, a degree in Creative Writing from monster movie hosts, tunnels through time and North Carolina – I think every science fiction other fascinating phenomena of the 20th Century. workshop should have at least one Blake All material by Andy Hooper unless indicated. Crouch, and sometimes more. Contents of Issue #26: But they certainly don’t all write as well as Page 1: Our Timelines, Ourselves Crouch, who can slide 329 pages by you Page 2: A Key to Interlineations in Issue #25 before your skepticism has a chance to Page 5: Comments on Turbo-Apa #414 protest. His 2019 time travel novel Recursion Page 8: Horror Host of the Month: was the subject of the January “Books Without Bill Camfield: The Gorgon is a Twerp! Borders” discussion, conducted via Zoom last Page 12: Fanmail from some Flounder Dept: night. Almost everyone had finished the book, Letters to CAPTAIN FLASHBACK. and several people commented on how easy Page 13: I Remember Entropy Dept. Crouch’s prose is to read. Everyone seemed to “Harry Warner’s parallel universe” admire the professional quality of the writing, By Arnold S. Patou, Hagerstown Herald-Mail, and found his characters decent company, First published in March 2003 even if some of us didn’t think they were particularly interesting. People who had also read it thought a little more highly of his 2016 novel Dark Matter; no one mentioned the “Wayward Pines” Trilogy, which was adapted to a TV series in 2015. His crime novel Good Behavior was also made into a TV series by TNT and it ran from 2016 to 2018. It’s enough to convince me that Crouch knows what he’s about; he’s comfortable working in both mystery and science fiction and to date, has brought 15 novels safely into harbor. Recursion is exactly the kind of science fiction novel that Hollywood producers love. First of all, space travel is not mentioned at all, and there are no talking space squids to be seen. Would you buy a used gorilla from this man? There is a dramatic technology at the center of (See Page 8.) the story, a device meant to record human [Continued on Page 3] --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Issue #26, January 2021 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- A Key to Interlineations published in December in CAPTAIN FLASHBACK #25: Page 3: “I eat serpent seven days a week.” Veteran assassin Gelt (Robert Vaughn) in Battle Beyond the Stars (1980). Page 4: “Better a fool’s paradise than none at all.” Interlineation attributed to Ray Nelson, FANAC #80, October 1961. Page 5: “Giving up is always easy, It’s the peace the follows that sucks.” Attributed to fantasy novelist Rachel Caine (1962-2020). Page 6: “Widmark changed motion pictures forever, displaying a gleeful sadism that was something entirely new in movies.” Eddie Mueller, host of Turner Classic Movies’ Noir Alley, discusses Richard Widmark’s unforgettable debut in Henry Hathaway’s Kiss of Death (1947). Page 7: “A landmark of American cinema for several reasons, none of them having to do with its Christmas spirit.” More from Eddie Mueller on Kiss of Death, starring Victor Mature, Colleen Gray and Brian Donlevy. Page 8: “In the shadow of the cargoes I take you one time.” & Page 9: “We’re counting all the numbers down to the waterline.” Lyrics from the song “Down to the Waterline,” recorded by Dire Straits on their self-titled debut album, 1978. Page 10: “You know what I do to squealers?” & Page 11: “I let ‘em have it in the belly, so they can roll around for a long time thinkin’ it over.” A pair of lines by the cackling sadist Tommy Udo (Richard Widmark) in Kiss of Death (1947) Page 12: “So much time and so little to do, Wait a minute, Strike that, Reverse it. Thank you.” The inimitable Willy Wonka (Gene Wilder), Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (1971) Page 13: “I realize you weren’t born a wolf, but couldn’t you at least act like one?” & Page 14: “You’ve never been a more endangered species than you are right now.” Tough love from the sensible panther Bagheera (Sebatian Cabot), Walt Disney’s The Jungle Book (1967) Page 14: “I Had a Lot Of Headaches But the End of the Stencil Down There” Interlineation published by Terry Carr, FANAC #68, December 19th, 1960. Page 16: “I love my Roomba, because our house is always so full of hair.” Statement by Turbo-Apa member Hope Kiefer during the December 2020 post-collation Zoom session. Page 17: “I wonder often what the Call Girls buy…” Interlineation published by Redd Boggs, DISCORD #15, November, 1961 Page 18: “I love sports. Whenever I can, I watch the Detroit Tigers on the radio.” Attributed to President Gerald R. Ford (1913-2006) age 19: “You could never get the smell of bubblegum out of your cards, but you kept your Yankees cards. Pristine.” Attributed to American Actor and Director Penny Marshall (1943-2018). ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- “The way I love monsters is a Mexican way of loving monsters, which is that I am not judgmental. The Anglo way of seeing things is that monsters are exceptional and bad, and people are good. But in my movies, creatures are taken for granted.” ◼ Guillermo del Toro “I have an idea for a Godzilla movie that I've always wanted to do. The whole idea of Godzilla's role in Tokyo, where he's always battling these other monsters, saving humanity time and again - wouldn't Godzilla become God? It would be called 'Living Under the Rule of Godzilla.' ◼ Quentin Tarantino “Women are the most important part of horror because, by and large, women are the ones the horror happens to. Women have to endure it, fight it, survive it—in the movies and in real life. They are at risk of attack from real-life monsters. In America, a woman is assaulted every nine seconds.” ◼ Molly O’Meara, The Lady from the Black Lagoon 2 Our Timelines, Ourselves pages of struggle, do not in fact apply. Our Continued from Page 1 hero returns to the original moment of divergence, neatly pinches it off and smugly memories for the benefit of those losing them prepares to enjoy being the wisest old man in due to dementia. Improbably, if not the history of the world. I’d have been more ridiculously, this system can be used as an annoyed, but I remembered that even a good effective method of travel into the past time travel story can make you want to throw represented by one’s memories – but only if it against the wall when you’re done. the subject is willing to die and abandon the life they have lived since the memory was Recursion also makes the point that human formed. The only problem comes when the identity is forever defined and limited by our traveler reaches the point from which they sensory capabilities and the minute delays returned to the past – not only does the between the reception of light and sound awareness of both of the traveler’s “timelines” waves and our brain’s ability to interpret them suddenly re-appear in their brain, but also in means that we perpetually live a split second the minds of everyone everywhere. in the past. Our bodies already occupy a future that we can’t yet observe. With this in As the technology proliferates, reality fractures mind, the idea that we might be able to go to the point where humanity cannot endure or backwards in time through sheer force of understand its existence and can do nothing brain chemistry begins to seem disturbingly but destroy itself. The protagonists are able to plausible. reset their lives repeatedly but face the necessity of destroying the time travel Derivation Without Derision technology without any tool other than time Recursion has many elements which seemed travel. They also develop a passionate and familiar from other novels and films, and we devoted relationship of the kind that had a good time trying to come up with a bag Hollywood lives on, and romantically seek one full of them. Ken Grimwood’s 1986 novel another out across multiple realities. The Replay made similar use of the idea of time narrative ends with one impossibly old traveling at the moment of death. (No one is protagonist preparing to meet the other for saying time travel is convenient.) I recalled the the first time, which is really the 14th time, but novel Memories by Mike McQuay, which won with the hope that life will play out without the the Phil Dick Award in 1987, and in which invention of the memory travel technology. people in a state of heightened awareness approaching death could enter the lives of any Crouch makes a lot of choices that give ancestor in their genetic tree. This Recursion the potential to appeal to a mass immediately provoked a comparison with audience.