112211 ppaaggeess AApprriill 22001188 SSFF CCoommmmeennttaarryy 9966 TRIBUTES TO URSULA LE GUIN, KATE WILHELM, PETER NICHOLLS, BRIAN ALDISS 49th Anniversary Edition PETER YOUNG on THE INTERNATIONAL SF DATABASE ANDREW MILNER on GEORGE TURNER RON DRUMMOND on STEVE ERICKSON RAY SINCLAIR-WOOD on SF POETRY COLIN STEELE on THE SF/FANTASY FIELD ANDERS BELLIS GREG BENFORD RANDY BYERS STEPHEN CAMPBELL ELAINE COCHRANE PAUL COLLINS AGNES COSSATO GIAMPAOLO COSSATO ROBERT DAY LEIGH EDMONDS ROB GERRAND BRUCE GILLESPIE TERRY GREEN STEVE JEFFERY CAROL KEWLEY JOHN LITCHEN PATRICK MCGUIRE DENNY MARSHALL MURRAY MOORE GERALD MURNANE TONY PEACEY ANDY ROBSON FRANZ ROTTENSTEINER YVONNE ROUSSEAU SANJAR SIRCAR PAUL SKELTON MARTIN MORSE WOOSTER and many others Cover: Carol Kewley: ‘Utopian Cat’. S F Commentary 96 April 2018 121 pages SF COMMENTARY No. 96, April 2018, is edited and published by Bruce Gillespie, 5 Howard Street, Greensborough, VIC 3088, Australia. Phone: 61-3-9435 7786. Available only from eFanzines.com: Portrait edition (print page equivalent) at http://efanzines.com/SFC/SFC96P.PDF or Landscape edition (widescreen): at http://efanzines.com/SFC/SFC96L.PDF or from my email address: [email protected] All correspondence: [email protected]. Member fwa. Front cover: Carol Kewley: ‘Utopian Cat’. Back cover: Elaine Cochrane: ‘Untitled (2014).’ Cotton embroidery on linen. Artwork: Irene Pagram (p. 8); Anders Sandberg (pp. 19–20); Denny Marshall (pp. 83, 98, 102, 119); Agnes Cossatto (p. 113). Photographs: Fay Godwin (p. 8); Richard Wilhelm (p. 10); Andrew Porter (p. 12); George Turner Collection (p. 32); Randy Byers (‘King-sized Pine Cones’) (p. 42); Ray Sinclair-Wood (pp. 52, 54, 55, 57, 58, 95); John Litchen (pp. 79–80); Greg Benford (p. 88); Terry Green (p. 108); Paul Collins (p. 118). 2 Contents 31 THE SEA AND ETERNAL SUMMER: 14 BOOKS MY FRIENDS HAVE SENT ME AN AUSTRALIAN APOCALYPSE Editor Andrew Milner 28 THE BRUCE INDEX: 42 THE FREQUENCY OF LIBERATION BECOMING A MODERATING EDITOR AT ISDB Ron Drummond Peter Young 51 SF POETRY 79 LETTERS OF COMMENT ON SF COMMENTARY Ray Sinclair-Wood s 94 and 95 John Litchen :: Stephen Campbell :: Leigh Edmonds :: Gerald Murnane :: 61 THE FIELD Rob Gerrand :: Greg Benford :: Colin Steele Yvonne Rousseau :: Ray Wood :: Patrick McGuire :: Franz Rottensteiner :: Martin Morse Wooster :: Sanjay Sircar :: 4 I MUST BE TALKING TO MY FRIENDS Terry Green :: Tony Peacey :: Murray Moore :: Includes Editor’s tributes to Steve Jeffery :: Giampaolo Cossato :: Ursula Le Guin, Kate Wilhelm, Peter Nicholls Anders Bellis :: Andy Robson :: Robert Day :: Skel (Paul Skelton) :: Paul Collins :: and WE ALSO HEARD FROM ... 6 URSULA’S WORKSHOP Bruce Gillespie 90 BRIAN ALDISS’S HELLICONIA Yvonne Rousseau 3 I must be talking to my friends Tall timbers crashing And the fingertips know what the brain does not lian National University, Room 3.31, Beryl Rawson Building please hold on while the train is moving #13, Acton ACT 2601. please hold on cause the train is slowing picking up souls who don’t know they’re going My most glaring missed deadline has been the celebration of what — ‘Please Hold On While the Train Is Moving’, Old 97s: The would have been George Turner’s 100th birthday (October Grand Theatre Volume One 2016), or the twentieth anniversary of his death (June 2017). Thanks very much, Andrew Milner and Wesleyan Press, for Douglas Adams loving the sound of deadlines as they whooshed allowing me to reprint his article about The Sea and Summer. past, but it’s a bit unnerving when it happens to me. This is supposed to be the January 2018 issue of SF Commentary (the Go right now to google ‘Lucy Sussex’ and ‘Sydney Review of 49th anniversary issue) and this editorial was supposed to have Books’. Last year Lucy Sussex published a wonderful article, ‘An been finished by late December 2017. But some articles have been Anthropocene Tale and its Writer’ about George Turner’s writing waiting since February 2016, or much longer. in general and The Sea and Summer in particular. It can found at the website Sydney Review of Books. (Thanks also to Lucy for As SF Commentary 96 kept expanding throughout January and reminding me at Continuum that both of the Turner dates had February 2018, it became clear that I should include not only the whooshed past me.) 2016 lists and commentaries from people such as Jenny Bryce and Doug Barbour, but also their 2017 comments and lists. When Thanks to Ron Drummond and Ray Sinclair-Wood for waiting nattering to Ian Mond on Facebook, I asked him if I could include many months for me to publish their articles. his 2017 lists. Letters of comment kept arriving. Colin Steele’s column appears every issue, since I am now his only published What’s really upset my plans to finish this issue has been peering outlet. If you want Colin to review your books, send them into the forest of Science Fiction Land and watching the tall timbers to him at ANU College of Arts and Social Sciences, Austra- crashing. I was able to pay some sort of tribute to Brian Aldiss 4 The late late news, 2 April 2018: in SFC 95, but in short order I found myself trying to get isued to SF Commentary wins another Ditmar Award the idea of the loss of Ursula Le Guin (at 88), Kate Wilhelm (at 90), and Peter Nicholls (at 78) in quick succession. Blow me down and knock me over the yard arm. Or something. This morning I received an email from Andy Porter in New York, And Stephen Hawking, at the improbable age of 75, given that who read it on the File 770 news site, that I had won this year’s he has spent 50 years of his life suffering from the motor neurone Ditmar Award for Best Fan Production. Faced with the mighty disease. Not that I feel in any way qualified to talk about his work. podcasts and blogs that have dominated this category for the last A year or so ago everybody was watching a rather bland movie 10 years, I did not expect ever to win another Ditmar. about his life, The Theory of Everything, but canny SF readers Thanks very much to the voting members of this year’s Swan- would be well advised to seek out on DVD the much better film, con/national convention, held in Perth over Easter, for this grati- Hawking (2004), starring Benedict Cumberbatch. Among its fying award. Thanks also to the many contributors to the magazine other strengths is its attempt to explain Hawking’s main ideas. over the years, and to Elaine, who has had to suffer all the strange processes by which the editor puts together each issue. Thanks Ursula K. Le Guin also to Lindsay, Steve, and the team at Copy Place in Melbourne for being my printers for more than 30 years, and to Bill Burns, The instant response to the news that we had lost Ursula K. Le whose hosting of the PDF of the magazine at his site fanzines.com Guin was for Carey Handfield to say, ‘You should prepare a makes it possible to keep publishing. Sorry I can’t print more than tribute to Ursula!’ Not, you will note, ‘I will prepare a tribute’, but a few copies these days; no thanks to Australia Post. ‘You should prepare a tribute’. I knew I had no time to do so, especially as the news came at the time when I received my first Nice to be able to announce this award in this 49th Anniversary piece of paying work in five months. (That’s another reason why edition of SF Commentary, only 46 years after John Bangsund the deadline jumped another month during the second half of handed me my first Ditmar Award for SFC at Syncon 2 in Sydney, February and the first half of March.) I was connected with Ursula and nine months before the 50th Anniversary edition. After all, it mainly through some wonderful letters of comment she wrote to was John Bangsund, Lee Harding, and John Foyster, the SF Commentary during the early 1970s, and the organising of the ASFR team, who gave me the impetus to publish in the first place. Writers Workshop in 1975. Which is why Carey Handfield might well have written his own tribute to Ursula, especially a story he Again, thanks to my supporters, literary, artistic, and financial, for told me in person about visiting her and her family in Portland, staying the distance over all these years. It’s good to win an award Oregon, during his DUFF trip in the late 1970s. Most of my named after Ditmar (Dick Jenssen), one of my greatest sup- comments about the memorable fortnight in August 1975 — the porters. week’s workshop and the week of the first Aussiecon — can be found in a piece I wrote for The Altered I: An Encounter with Congratulations to the other nominated people and winners at this Science Fiction by Ursula K. Le Guin and Others, edited by year’s Ditmar Awards ceremony — it’s very satisfying to hear that Lee Harding (Norstrilia Press, 1976). The article appears below. Edwina Harvey has won this year’s A. Bertram Chandler Other workshop members wrote vivid pieces for that collection. Award and Van Ikin has won the Peter McNamara Award. However, Ursula’s continuing influence in my life has been mainly Lifetime achieves, both of them. — 2 April 2018 through her fiction, especially the ‘Earthsea’ books, The Lathe of 5 Heaven, The Dispossessed, her deep and mind-jostling short have been reading her blog for years, but I’m not a blog-follower.