STEAM ENGINE TIME No

Steam Engine T ime Gregory Benford Paul Brazier Andrew M. Butler Darrell Schweitzer and many others Issue 4 January 2005 Steam Engine T ime 4 STEAM ENGINE TIME No. 4, January 2005 is edited and published by Bruce Gillespie, 5 Howard Street, Greensborough VIC 3088, Australia ([email protected]) and Janine Stinson, PO Box 248, Eastlake, MI 49626-0248, USA ([email protected]). First edition is in .PDF file format from eFanzines.com or from either of our email addresses. Print edition available for The Usual (letters or substantial emails of comment, artistic contributions, articles, reviews, traded publications or review copies) or subscriptions (Australia: $40 for 5, cheques to ‘Gillespie & Cochrane Pty Ltd’; Overseas: $US30 or 12 pounds for 5, or equivalent, airmail; please send folding money, not cheques). Printed by Copy Place, 415 Bourke Street, Melbourne VIC 3000. The print edition is made possible by a generous financial donation from Our American Friend. Graphics Ditmar (Dick Jenssen) (front and back covers). Photographs Covers of various books and magazines discussed in this issue; plus photos of (p. 7) Darrell Schweitzer (unknown) and John Baxter (Dick Jenssen); (p. 8) Lee Harding, John Baxter and Mervyn Binns (Helena Binns); (p. 15) Andrew M. Butler (Paul Billinger). 3 Editorial 1: Unlikely resurrections 30 Letters of comment Bruce Gillespie and Janine Stinson E. D. Webber David J. Lake 3 Editorial 2: The journeys they took Sean McMullen Bruce Gillespie Tom Coverdale Rick Kennett Eric Lindsay 7 Tales of members of the Book Tribe Janine Stinson Darrell Schweitzer Joseph Nicholas Rob Gerrand 9 Epilogue: If the house caught fire . Arthur D. Hlavaty Darrell Schweitzer Terry Jeeves Matthew Davis 9 Funeral games Steve Sneyd Darrell Schweitzer Bob Smith Martin Morse Wooster 11 Leaping the abyss Lloyd and Yvonne Penney Gregory Benford Ulrich Spiegel Franz Rottensteiner 15 The British Boom: What boom? Whose boom? Andrew Weiner Kim Huett 15 Thirteen ways of looking at the British Boom Cy Chauvin Andrew M. Butler Mats Linder Erika Maria Lacey Barrantes 27 Pioneer Award Acceptance Speech Claire Brialey Andrew M. Butler and others 28 Dissenting opinion: If this goes on: Butler, Science Fiction Studies, Interzone and the ‘British Boom’ Paul Brazier Welcome to our new co-editor: Janine Stinson. See her self-introduction on page 3. 2 Editorial 1: Unlikely resurrections I (Bruce Gillespie) thought Steam Engine of Science Fiction, the Internet Review of subscribed through me, and will do my Time had died when British co-editors Science Fiction, and Strange Horizons. I best to honour those subscriptions. I have Maureen Kincaid Speller and Paul Kin- approached Bruce Gillespie with the idea no idea what to do about the subscribers caid lost interest a year or so ago. Paul, as of reviving Steam Engine Time because, whose names I don’t have. All I can do is production editor, was a hard act to fol- very simply, I missed getting and read- appeal through the email lists for them to low, and I was too busy with my other ing it and felt there weren’t enough get in touch. Otherwise, I will have to projects to try emulating his meticulous avenues available for the sercon variety guess (from the SET correspondence publishing style. of material I prefer to read.’ lists) the people who took most interest This new incarnation of Steam Engine in the first three issues of SET. Apologies Early in 2004, Janine Stinson sent me an Time doesn’t look the same as the three in advance to interested readers who email offering to help revive Steam issues assembled by Paul and Maureen. miss out. Engine Time. I knew little about her ex- Paul gained some wonderful layout cept that she was the affable editor of the effects in Microsoft Publisher; so far I Reprints: Jan asked me to comment small, regular fanzine Peregrine Nations. I haven’t worked how to emulate them in about the number of reprint articles wasn’t even sure I was cut out to be a Ventura. Jan and I will find our own we’ve used in this issue of Steam Engine co-editor. Let Janine tell the story: style. Time. When I accepted Greg Benford’s ‘I’ve been reading SF since seventh article, he didn’t tell me that it was also grade, when I found André Norton’s Subscribers and others who receive the scheduled to appear in Guy Lillian’s Moon of Three Rings in my school library. print edition: I had a financial crisis at the Challenger (No. 16) as well as in Reason. That was back in the Jurassic, mind. I beginning of 2004. I announced my fan- Darrell Schweitzer’s article was offered graduated from Western Michigan Uni- zines would go ‘all-electronic’: that is, be first to SET, then appeared first in New versity in 1979 with a Bachelor of Arts published in .PDF format on Bill Burns’ York Review of SF only because of SET’s degree in English. I’ve been a newspaper wonderful efanzines.com website. seeming disappearance. Andy’s article reporter and editor (arts and copy), a Readers objected. They wanted the appeared first in an academic journal soldier (signals intelligence analyst), a print versions of SF Commentary and my (Science Fiction Studies) and Paul’s in a thrift-shop item cleaner, a moving and other fanzines. They sent money. That semiprofessional magazine (Interzone), storage company clerk, and a Baskin & also led to our commitment to publishing so you may not have read them before. Robbins ice-cream shop server. a print edition of Steam Engine Time. The Jan also wondered why I was using a ‘I’ve lived in a variety of places, most very first edition, however, will appear long review as my editorial. Read it and recently in the Florida Keys for over a on efanzines.com as a .PDF. see; I think it’s as much about me as about decade, and had to leave the hard way — I’ve asked Paul Kincaid five times if the book under discussion. I was widowed in January 2003. My son he has any list of Americans, Britons or and I now live in my heart’s country in Europeans who subscribed to Steam En- — Bruce Gillespie (on behalf of Janine northern Michigan, where I write for gine Time, and haven’t received an Stinson), December 2004 publications such as the New York Review answer. I have a list of the people who Editorial 2: The journeys they took The Best Australian Science Fiction time ends one moment from now. I look science fiction books in Australia was so Writing: A Fifty Year Collection, backwards down the inside slope of the difficult a task that it seemed almost un- edited by Rob Gerrand bowl — at History, a vast, colourful ter- imaginable that any of those books ritory filled with everything that has hap- should be written by Australians. Only a (Black Inc ISBN 1- 86395-301-9; pened. I cannot jump from where I am few of them were written by Britons; the 2004; 615 pp.; and land in any spot in the bowl, but from rest, it seemed, by Americans. $A39.95/$US32.00) the edge I can see clearly sections of it, Yet in 1959, when I was twelve and especially that small section through discovered the British magazines New Time is like an ever-expanding bowl. I which I lived. Worlds, Science Fiction Adventures and Sci- stand forever at one edge of the bowl — Rob Gerrand’s vantage point on the ence Fantasy, I was amazed to find that the Present. Over the outside edge is The bowl of time is very close to my own. No Australian authors were published regu- Dark. Perhaps it is the Future, and the doubt he also remembers vividly a time larly there. The editor of the three maga- bowl expands forever, or perhaps all in the 1950s when obtaining enjoyable zines, E. J. (Ted) Carnell, had a feature 3 page in each New Worlds showing a pic- stories by Australian writers only in Much sharper, and with a memorable ture of one of his regular authors, plus a overseas magazines. He chooses to begin twist ending, is A. Bertram Chandler’s short biography. Two I remember were his own journey through Australian SF in ‘The Cage’ (1957), which had sold to one those for Wynne N. Whiteford and David 1955 (with Frank Bryning’s ‘Infant Prod- of the top markets, America’s Fantasy & Rome (David Boutland), although I sus- igy’), but, as his advisers Graham Stone, Science Fiction. Chandler, a British sea pect he also did features on Lee Harding, Sean McMullen and Van Ikin would captain, had chosen to make his home in John Baxter and Frank Bryning. have reminded him, he might have be- Australia after already scoring some Frank Bryning and Wynne Whiteford gun much earlier. The long reach back major successes in the American maga- had each begun a writing career in the into the late nineteenth and early twenti- zines. Until 1982, when he died, he was American magazines before World War eth centuries was one of the strengths of regarded here as Australia’s senior SF II. After the war, these and the other Aus- Van Ikin’s 1981 anthology Portable Aus- writer, but the SF world in general saw tralian authors usually sold their stories tralian Science Fiction, which should be him as one of the major writers of Amer- in Britain, although each no doubt revised and reissued. ica’s ‘Golden Age’ of SF magazine pub- hoped he might score a spot in one of the The lack of local markets had an in- lishing.

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