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Brum Group News The Monthly Newsletter of the BIRMINGHAM SCIENCE FICTION GROUP SEPTEMBER 2020 Issue 588 Honorary President: CHRISTOPHER PRIEST Committee: Carol Goodwin (Chair); Pat Brown (Treasurer); Dave Corby (secretary); Theresa Derwin (Publicity Officer); Carol Goodwin (Newsletter Editor); Ian Morley (Membership Secretary); Novacon 50 Chair: Alice Lawson & Tony Berry website: Email: www.birminghamsfgroup.org.uk/ [email protected] Facebook: Twitter: www.facebook.com/groups/BirminghamSFGroup/ @BirminghamSF BSFG Meetings cancelled Editorial: I just wanted to say thank you to all the people who took the time to respond to my request last month for people to contribute or keep up to date. As you can see from the “And What Did You Think? Section below, there has been an excellent response which is much appreciated. I hope you enjoy reading them as much as I did and maybe it will encourage more of you to get in touch. Stay well. CG AND WHAT DID YOU THINK? THE LETTER COLUMN OF ‘BRUM GROUP NEWS Anything to say about the Group, meetings or SF in general? Email your opinions or queries to me at [email protected] The BSFG Auction – Michael Jones Since time immemorial the auction of members' contributions following the AGM has been a valued and enjoyable event in the Group calendar. I can remember when our favourite auctioneer used to stand in front of an audience of twenty or thirty, cajoling them into paying more than they expected for things they didn't know they wanted. But things have changed. Last January what we had was a sort of tabletop sale and although some money was undoubtedly made for group funds, whether anything much remained unsold and what may have happened to it are matters on which I am unable to comment. I wonder if it may be time to consider abandoning the idea or, at least, devising an alternative format which would work better and, one hopes, more profitably. However, it is not my place to say what it might. be. Perhaps other members, or the committee, might have some ideas. MJ GHOSTS by Chris Morgan One advantage of being old––I've met so many authors now dead. From Bob Shaw at the first Novacon, my first con, who said, "Come, meet Anne McCaffrey and James White," to those comets of our ghetto and famous even outside it, Adams, Banks and Pratchett, who shone very brightly, not for long enough, now dead. I remember James Blish, who invited me for a meal, I remember Frank Herbert, late arriving in Brum, who crossed out his printed name as he signed, I remember Isaac Asimov, unforgettable, I remember Roger Zelazny, Robert Sheckley, John Brunner, who died at a convention, Rob Holdstock, who was my best man, Ray Bradbury, that I shared a room with. Dozens more. Is writing SF bad for your health? Kills you young? Only Fred Pohl (we had an Italian together in Brum) who died at 93 would say no. I'm dizzy from the deaths. I spoke to them all. I have their books. Those books are the ghosts of their authors, with a life of their own, conjuring up the spirits of the dead. As long as the books exist, so do their creators. Imagine them, hunched over typewriters in stuffy rooms, little exercise except for their minds, so that all of us in this room and generations to come 2 could be amazed, astounded, thrilling wondered by their inventiveness. Yes, these dead are always with us: by their books ye shall know them, and the pages of the books, white and flapping, through the long reading hours of the night, are their immortal ghosts. 21st August 2015 Life During Coronavirus Ian Stewart You invited news from Brum Group members in the latest BG News. We’re all OK here, so far. I think I was the first planned speaker to cancel, back before lockdown. Looking forward to the event being reinstated, when it's safe to do so. You'll have a backlog! Being retired and living on the edge of Coventry, we've been in a better position than people stuck in city centres and worried about their jobs. We were able to get out for an hour every day during the first lockdown phase, and kept shopping to a minimum. The main activities we lost were about four trips overseas --- two cancelled, two abandoned before booking. (Of course, we'd taken out annual travel insurance for them all. Ho hum.) Oh, and the Discworld Convention, which should have been running as I write. (I've been hooking up electronically, which is better than nothing.) I've kept busy writing (one new pop maths book now accepted by the publisher, one SF novel allegedly being looked at, one new SF novel part written) and doing my maths research (two papers accepted during lockdown, plus continuing to work on a 900-page book with my American collaborator Marty Golubitsky). We see The Tribe from time to time (our two sons and the eldest one's family), since they live in Coventry. Overall, life is much as it would have been anyway. One thing I do miss: Warwick Uni is closed right now, and I can't go in for coffee and a chat, which I usually did twice a week. But basically, I can't complain much --- except about the dreadful mess our government is making of everything it touches. Dave Hardy To be honest, it hasn’t made an enormous difference to me, so far anyway. I’ve been freelance since 1965, so am well used to working at home. So I mainly miss not being able to go to the Brum Group - and greatly regret the 3 cancellation of Novacon - one of my highlights of the year! Also not being able to go out for a meal with friends etc. (I know this has been relaxed a bit, but it’s not the same …). I still haven’t bought or read a new book for quite a while, and am picking more or less at random on the hundreds of books on my shelves. At the moment I’m reading THE RAGGED ASTRONAUTS by Bob Shaw — one of my favourite authors, not surprisingly as he was a friend, to the Brum Group as well as personally, and many of his books are signed ‘To Dave …. ’ and of course we did GALACTIC TOURS together. I did consider writing a ‘retro-review’ of this, but it is the first in a trilogy so there is not much point unless I intend to review all three. Oh - and I’m currently working on a quite large commission: a 20”x30” acrylic painting of an extrasolar planet for a client in Nashville, USA! Wendell Wagner I thought you might like to know about what my experiences with doing things online are like here (in the Washington, D.C. area). There are three groups which meet monthly which I belong to which are more or less concerned with science fiction and/or fantasy. One of them is a group which meets one evening at a restaurant for a meal for general discussion which is more or less related to science fiction. That one has simply postponed all meetings until restaurants open up again here. The second group meets at members' houses where we discuss what science fiction or fantasy books we've read. That one cancelled the March meeting. The April and May meetings were online. I skipped the April one. The May meeting worked O.K, I thought. The June meeting will be online. The third group is a standard book discussion group which meets in members' houses where we discuss a book someone has picked, the books usually being science fiction or fantasy. We had March, April, and May meetings online. For March, we just had general discussion about past and future books and meetings (and I skipped that meeting.) For the April and May meetings, we were also online and discussed that month's book. Those meetings went reasonably well, I thought. We used the Zoom or the Discord apps for the meetings. So I think it does work O.K. to have a few online meetings, though soon we will get tired of this. Incidentally, Balticon, one of the two big science fiction conventions in the Baltimore/Washington area, was converted to an online convention a month or two before it happened. Membership in it was changed to being free, and the people who paid early got their money 4 back. Again, it worked O.K. Yeah, I could only go to panels and other talks. I think there was the equivalent of a con suite, but I didn't go to it. Yeah, I missed going to the dealers' room and hanging out with friends, but there was no way to do that online. I don't know when I will next have a chance to see all of you. I have been to five Brum Group meetings since I moved back to the U.S. in 1990, including the August social last year. I hope to be able to see you all sometime soon. NEWS IN BRIEF .... Actor Chadwick Boseman has died aged 43, from colon cancer. He had been diagnosed 4 years ago but kept the news quiet and continued to work. He was most famous for his inspirational role as Black Panther in four Marvel movies including the BLACK PANTHER film, which was the first superhero film to receive an Oscar nomination for Best Picture …. The Amazon Prime adaptation of Iain Banks’ Culture series has been cancelled.

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