Argentus, Once Again Papers, So When She Says That I’Ve Been Important to Her Cause, W Coming out in the Waning Days of the Year
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From the Mine elcome to the 2008 edition of Argentus, once again papers, so when she says that I’ve been important to her cause, W coming out in the waning days of the year. And what a take that with a huge grain of Lot’s wife. Sucking up to the year its been. Apparently there was an election in the United editor isn’t necessary, Lynne. States, so an entire year’s worth of news was hijacked. The I was sitting behind Mike Glyer when he won his Hugo at political pundit class on television really needs to be put down Denvention for File 770 and I have to admit that if only one so the rest of us are put out of our misery. And that goes for Glyer won, I wish it had been the other, especially after I saw bloviators on both sides of the aisle. the first round voting statistics. So, I went behind Mike’s back I was very pleasantly surprised to receive an e-mail in and approached the other Glyer, Diana, and asked her if she March from Mary Kay Kare, Denvention’s Hugo would be willing to write about the research she conducted to Administrator informing me that Argentus had been produce her excellent Hugo-nominated study The Company nominated for a Hugo Award for Best Fanzine…the first time They Keep: C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien as Writers in the magazine has had that honor. Although I’m the editor and Community. Diana agreed to share her research secrets and the publisher, much of the quality of the ‘zine comes from the results can be read below. Diana, by the way, beats Lynne for dozens of people who have provided me with articles, illos, longest title by 7 words. letters of comment, and mock section pieces over the years. You may have heard a little about the politics of my state, Without them, Argentus would be little more than a perzine. Illinois. Apparently we run the gamut from Honest Abe to And one person who I specifically want to call out with thanks Rod Blagojevich. I look at a handful of our corrupt politicians is Mike Glyer, who eventually won the award this year. Back and try to explain how many Illinoisans view this particular at Chicon 2000, I mentioned to Mike that I was thinking about class of criminal. They may not be the best public servants doing a paper fanzine and Mike mentioned it in his Locus con money can buy, but they do provide entertainment value. report, making me feel that I had to go ahead with it. Mike’s Vampires seem to be everywhere these days, not just in the fanzine, File 770 narrowly edged Argentus in the first round of pages of a Stephanie Meyer series, but roaming a variety of voting, and Argentus eventually finished fourth in a field of cities. For some people, like the woman who sits next to me at very good competition. Thank you again to those who work, these are bonanza reading times, however Pat Sayre nominated, voted for, or have contributed to Argentus. McCoy returns to the pages of Argentus to explain “Why This issue contains a variety of pairings: Chris Garcia’s Sexy, Studly Vampires Suck.” TAFF Report, chapter two and John Hertz’s Japan trip report, Kicking off this issue is a piece by Paul Kincaid in which chapter two are both published here. John published the first he examines hard science fiction (and to a lesser extent space part in File 770 and other portions of Chris’s report have opera) in terms of the right-wing/left-wing political spectrum. appeared in Drink Tank 165, Banana Wings 34, Vegas Fandom Weekly 107, and SF/SF 67. The entirety of Chris’s From the Mine .........................................................................1 report can be found at http://TAFF.org.uk. Hard Right ...............................................................................2 I also have paired articles by Daniel Kimmel and Fred TAFF Report ...........................................................................5 Lerner in which these two look at their fields, Daniel at films The Residence of the Wind......................................................7 and Fred at books, and confess the classics (or not so classics) My State’s Politics.................................................................10 that they have somehow managed to miss. Why Sexy, Studly Vampires Suck.........................................13 Alma Alexander discusses the lessons she learned at Notes from Film School ........................................................14 LaunchPad, an astronomy for writers seminar hosted by Dusting for Fingerprints: How a Determined Researcher Michael Brotherton and my nephew, Zachary Charney Cohen, Stumbled Across the Clues that Unlocked the Creative Process makes his fannish debut writing about his experiences of Lewis, Tolkien, and the Inklings .......................................16 working on the set of a potential television pilot on Catalina An Interview with Michael A. Burstein.................................19 Island during the summer. How Steven H Silver Helped Save the Archives of at Least 15 A few months ago, I interviewed author Michael A. Authors for Posterity .............................................................22 Burstein, whose first collection, I Remember the Future is My Must See List ..................................................................24 now out. You can read the interview here and then order the Errors and Omissions.............................................................25 book on-line or through your local bookstore. LaunchPad 2008: And the sky was full of stars….................27 For several years, Lynne Thomas has been working to Letters of Comment...............................................................30 build a science fiction archive at Northern Illinois University Mock Section: Reviews by Blurbs.........................................34 in DeKalb and I’ve asked her to write about it for Argentus. Local History.........................................................................39 Lynne has also been trying to get me to donate my collection of fanzines, books, magazines, and convention-running Illustrations: Cover…delphyne wood Argentus is published annually by Steven H Silver. You can p.5 Brianna Spacekat Wu & Frank Wu reach him at 707 Sapling Lane, Deerfield, IL 60015-3969 or via pp 12, 13…Deb Kosiba p 21…Brad Foster e-mail at [email protected]. His LiveJournal is at p.24…Taral Wayne shsilver.livejournal.com and his website is at p.30…Sheryl Birkhead www.sfsite.com/~silverag. He’s also on Facebook. p.34…Trinlay Khadro p.36 …William Rotsler 1 Hard Right Paul Kincaid go some way towards explaining why characterization has I never been a strong point of hard SF stories. shuttle is delivering vital medical supplies to a plagued II A world when the pilot discovers a stowaway. It’s a little girl, innocent, weak, all too human, just anxious to visit her or the sake of comparison, let me turn to the type of brother on the doomed planet. But the pilot knows how finely Fscience fiction story that was superceded by hard SF, and tuned his craft is, even this marginal increase in payload which seems to have regained a measure of dominance in the means it cannot safely land. The little girl would not, could genre: space opera. not, harm a fly, but her very presence threatens the survival of As an exemplar, let us consider the Lensman series by E.E. an entire planet. “Doc” Smith. The six novels that make up the series contain The situation is, of course, entirely artificial. There is no all the characteristics we associate with space opera: a vast way that the shuttle, especially on such an important mission, scale in both space and time, immense powers, ever greater would not have failsafe supplies of fuel on board. There are, as weapons. At every stage in the story the enemy becomes endless discussions of “The Cold Equations” since it was first bigger and the powers deployed against them thus become published in 1954 have amply demonstrated (see The New commensurably greater. In the end they are flinging entire York Review of Science Fiction, passim), plenty of other things suns at each other. The crudity and silliness of this that the pilot might have chosen to jettison before the girl. notwithstanding, there is one obvious underlying fact: this is Indeed, we know that the author, Tom Godwin, revised the not a universe of constraint, but rather one of plenty. story many times to try and avoid its dire conclusion, but each If we turn to a modern equivalent of Smith’s series, the time John W. Campbell struck his changes down and insisted Culture novels of Iain M. Banks, we can see that this universe on the dire inevitability of the girl’s death. It is this that has of plenty is overtly cast as a utopia. There are no limits in the made it the archetypal hard SF story. universe of the Culture, at least none that constrain the What is significant about the story is not the misogyny. characters. The laws of nature, if and where they are The fact that the victim is a little girl ratchets up the emotional acknowledged (and Smith certainly seems to have paid little impact, but the stowaway could as easily have been a little heed to contemporary scientific understanding), are not boy, the pilot’s wife, the first alien ever encountered. Who she restrictions on action but tools that can be exploited. Humans is, is irrelevant. Nor, perhaps surprisingly, is the technology are free to be and do whatever they might wish, which is as important. There is remarkably little technological know-how implicit in Smith’s creation of ever greater weapons as it is in in the story, the pilot knows as much about his craft as the Banks having a character in Matter remake himself as a bush. average driver knows about his car. Nothing in the story In other words, the principle underlying space opera, the hinges on the technology other than the initial set-up, and the universe within which the space opera operates, is based fact that there is no failsafe suggests that this is neither a likely ultimately on freedom, on openness, on plenty.