Askance Volume VIII, Number 3 Whole Number 35

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December 2015 Askance Volume VIII, Number 3 Whole Number 35

Edited and published by John Purcell, 3744 Marielene Circle, College Station, TX 77845-3926

3744 Marielene Circle, College Station, TX 77845 Even so, all rights revert to original artists and authors upon publication. Disclaimers are a dirty business, but are always included.

What you have here in your hands (or on screen) is another Mythical Publication. Copies of this fine, sort of semi- quarterly fanzine can be had for The Usual, which means expressed interest, submission and eventual inclusion of articles and artwork, letters of comment, expressed interest, and cold hard cash in the amount of $3.00 USD. Bribes are also accepted. Of course, if you send in locs, articles, and artwork, you just earned a life-time free subscription. Not a bad deal, if you ask me.

Contents

Bemused Natterings…………………………………………....3 The Search for Extraterrestrial Life, by Thomas D. Sadler………………………………………...5 The Post-Modern Fan Awakens, By John Purcell………………………………………………..7 Figby, by Bill Fischer…………………………..……...……...13 Two Novels by Francis Stevens, By Randy Byers……………………………………………….14 Fanzine Reviews……………………………………….………...16 New Orleans in 2018………………………………….……….19 From the Hinterlands, faithful readers………………..20 Regional Convention Calendar…………………………...28 Chat, the 4th Fannish Ghod, by Teddy Harvia……..36

What’s Next………………………………………………………..37

Art Credits

Front cover by Steve Stiles Sheryl Birkhead—2; clip art—3, 5, 30, 33, 37; photo by John Purcell—4; nicked off Internet—5, 6, 7, 11, 12, 14, 15, 20, 33, 34; Robert Whitaker Sirignano—9; Al Sirois—10, 28 ; fanzine covers copied from efanzines.com—17,18; A. B. Kynock—17, 24, 27, 31, 32; Steve Stiles—35; Jose Sanchez—37. Back cover by Ditmar

Member FWA (since 2007!) 2

Why this issue is not late

I say that because I can. In fact, the publishing schedule of this fanzine has cleverly morphed over its existence from bimonthly to quarterly to semi-quarterly to Real Soon Now. Works for me, and that’s all that really matters now, isn’t it?

Be that as it may, it feels good to get back to working on this fanzine again, even though it requires a fair amount of time, effort, and nagging some people—but not too hard—for material. However, that also means I had to write new material myself, which likewise takes time.

So what is really different this issue is that I am attempting to produce it completely in Word Publisher. Yes, I know, this could very well be an exercise in futility and I may resort to using Office Word Docu- ment again, but why not? If it looks good and works reasonably well, then the experiment will be worth the effort. If not, so be it.

And speaking of bees…

Whoops, there goes another bumble-bee

One of the totally crazy, ludicrous, if not downright ridiculous things about living in this region of Texas—the area that I frequently refer to as the Land That Time Forgot—is that there are insects and all sorts of other ground critters that literally bug you year round. Once in a while, such as this year’s Thanksgiving Holiday weekend, the weather has turned a bit chilly (morning temperatures in the 40’s F, that is) so there are less creepy crawlies meandering about. That doesn’t last very long around here, sadly, because this is a subtropical region and the temperature will bounce back into the 70s by afternoon with hardly a thought. What usually happens then is that all those creepy crawlies and flying insects return from their brief hibernation and resume their typical annoying habits. This is why, when recently clearing out another section of our garage, mostly crammed full of junk we have accumulated over the years, I had to knock down and crush a half-dozen mud dauber wasp nests. Those danged things looked like high-rise condominiums designed by the Anasazi tribes of the American southwestern desert.

This is typical. I know of no other place on this planet outside of the Amazon jungle—well, my experiences are limited to what I read or find during Internet searches—where a person is liable to be stung by mosquitos in January. It’s not natural. Okay, so I grew up in Minnesota where winters last for six or seven months and the temperature is subfreez- ing for most of those months, and the net result of such bitter cold is that insects either (a) hibernate or (b) die. I much prefer (b), but beggars can’t be choosers. The bottom line is that I really get tired of dealing with flying and crawling insects all the year round.

Just don’t get me started on the slithering beasties. Please, don’t.

3 Over the bosom of the Earth–Mother, in pulsating vibrations, radiant and energizing, flows the perennial Stream of Life.

The joys of grandfatherhood

I do have to admit that I’m starting to get the hang of being a grandfather. In fact, it’s downright awesome. On Face- book I have posted many a picture of our grandson Brian over the last two and a half years—that long already? Dang, but time certainly does have wings—extolling his status as “The World’s Cutest Grandson,” and have tailed off on that recently. And then Hallow- een this year happened, and he happily wore his Batman costume around while trick or treating with his mom, uncle Dan, and a couple others around their neighborhood. Unfortunately, he refused to wear the cowl, defiantly ripping it off whenever someone—usually his mother—would try to put it back on. No luck. As it turned out, he still rocked the look, as this picture attests. He may not have the strength of ten men, or be able to stop a rac- ing train, but he will cuteness you into submission. Who’s in this issue

Some old names, some new names have joined the fray, and not a moment too soon. I am pleased to see the return of good friends to Askance, and very happy to get material from new people. This is definitely A Good Thing.

Randy Byers

Fresh off the success of Sasquan, the recent World SF Convention in Smoky Spokane, Washington, Randy has apparently recovered enough to read books and write reviews. Recently he wrote a blog entry on LiveJournal (I guess people still use it from time to time) in which he reviewed two books by Francis Stevens. Randy was kind enough to forward them to me for usage here. Bill Fischer

It was a surprise to learn that Bill had suffered a heart attack back in September of 2014, but he has recovered and back to doing things he loves. Then I had the nerve to ask him for another “Figby” cartoon strip. Hopefully the stress of producing these again won’t cause another coronary. One year I still would love to collect them all into a bound volume. Dream on... Teddy Harvia

I was astonished when Teddy (a.k.a., David Thayer, a.a.k.a., Miranda Thomson) asked if I would be interested in giving his “Chat, the 4th Fannish Ghod” comic series a new home: it used to run as a feature in Dick and Nicki Lynch’s legend- ary fanzine, Mimosa, and it is indeed a great honor to welcome it here as a recurring feature, alongside “Figby”, in this fanzine. And that’s no mean feat, finding room for a 500 pound cat. Thomas D. Sadler

And lastly, only by dint of alphabetic order, I welcome to these pages the editor/publisher of the fine, 100+ issue fanzine The Reluctant Famulus. Tom is an avowed space nut, like so many of us, who also frequently talks to himself (like so many of us), and even talks back to himself (uh, like so many of us), and sometimes those conversations lead to fanzine articles (yeah, like so many of us). And unfortunately—like so many of us—he also watches old science fiction movies. I detect a trend here. 4 Be not fond of the dull, smoke-coloured light from Hell.

The Search for Extraterrestrial Life

Or: What’ll We Do When We find It? by Thomas D. Sadler The SETI program is humming along, searching for evidence and solid proof of intelligent life on the right kinds of planets circling the right kind of stars in the right distance from the stars. Those involved in SETI and their supporters are hoping there is other intelligent life so that we won’t have to feel all alone in the universe. They’re also hoping we can somehow get in touch with and communicate with them. But why are they so eager to do that? There are detrac- tors who assert that it would be bad for us if we did and we would regret the results. They assert those other intelligent beings will do all sorts of awful things to us. That sounds paranoid to me. Paranoia: “a psychological disorder characterized by delusions of persecution or grandeur.” Yes, that sounds like us. We humans seem to possess a paranoia that has no boundaries. Consider what we dream up in our fiction, motion pictures, and television series. Here are some examples to ponder. To Serve Man, story by Damon Knight, adaptation from The Twi- light Zone. Aliens come from a long way off to bring about peace and to exchange technology—and for a gourmet food supply. The Thing ( .a.k.a. Who Goes There?) The story features an alien who came from who knows where to do who knows what to us. Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Pod people who also came some great distance to replicate humans and take over our world. The Puppet Masters (both novel and movie). Aliens from far away who come to take control of our bodies for their own purposes. The Day the Earth Stood Still (a.k.a. Farewell to the Master). An alien emissary and his robot bodyguard come to Earth to invite us to join a union of planets but only if we give up all our nuclear weapons. If we don’t we’ll be quarantined and maybe obliterated. Not of This World, (A movie from 1957 and 1988.) A creepy story about shape-changing aliens who come to Earth for our blood. (That sounds like Vampires from space.) V, a TV series. Once again, aliens from who knows how far away show up for our water and slaves to do their bidding. Most Dr. Who episodes with weird malevolent aliens who want to rule Earth and everything else. The war of the Worlds (Both story and movie). Only this time the danger is from aliens much closer to Earth. Some of the episodes of The Outer Limits.

Independence Day (A movie). It’s the same old, same old thing. Extraterrestrial aliens in huge spacecraft arrive to wreak havoc on Earth and conquer it for their nefarious purposes. Naturally, we humans fight back, as usual. With all these attacks, you’d think humankind would get tired of being the favorite target of all those anti-human aliens. There are other examples, but I’m sure you readers get the point by now. Then, too, there are all those accounts of those gray aliens who collect humans to insert subcutaneous tracking devices into them or provide free proctological or vaginal exams. That sounds bizarre to me. Why do we humans think we’re so damned special or attractive that residents of other planets are willing to spend decades traversing trillions of miles of space to get to us for any reason at all? Surely it would make more sense and be economically smarter for them to find some place closer to home than to take over Earth and its inhabitants. Who, beside us humans, knew or even suspected Earth and its inhabitants were so important and desirable that alien intelligences come from all over the universe to take advantage of us? It’s amazing how to learn how valuable we are. But then when you consider what we’re doing to our planet, and the disastrous results caused by us humans, that may not make Earth such a choice place to visit and take over. Who would want to travel trillions of miles only to find a seriously polluted world? Unless, however, the aliens know of a cheap way of undoing the pollution. Then, too, because the results are likely largely our doing, we might not be so desirable as slaves, food, or anything else . Speaking of food, by the way, for all we know, other alien life forms’ metabolisms may be such that we could be poisonous to them. That’s kind of comforting when you think about it and maybe that’s something to hope for. How about if we humans were like deadly nightshade mushrooms or the digitalis in foxglove to the aliens rather than a food source? Yeah. I know. What a ridiculous thought that is. But it’s something to consider which could be in our favor. This is all wild speculation and guess- ing, of course. We very likely will never know if any of that is true. But what will we do if or when we actually find and communicate with those ETs? What if our fears turn out not only to be real, but possibly even worse than our imaginings? Or what if we turned out to be the ET’s worst nightmare, as mentioned in the preceding paragraph? Okay. Okay. I admit that last speculation is probably really farfetched. Considering all the arguments against humans traveling to distant stars because of the difficulties or impossibilities of FTL travel, there may not be that much for us to worry about. Unless, of course, those ETs have the capability of FTL travel or instantaneous travel because all our theories and perceptions about the nature of the universe are wrong and such things are possible. It’s just that we humans lack the necessary senses to see and understand the true nature of the universe. Or maybe the aliens—if they possess the technology to travel much faster than light—come here, take one good look at us, think, “Are you kidding me?” Then they decide we aren’t worth the time and effort, turn around, and go back home in disgust. Then on the way back spread the word to other aliens that those yokels on Earth are a big joke and not worth bothering about unless the aliens want a good laugh. They’d say, “You’re better off going elsewhere.” One last thought, if I may. Suppose that we successfully located another intelligent life form and sent a message to them and got the following reply: “Sorry, wrong number.”

- Tom Sadler

6 May they be transmuted into the sounds of the Six Syllables.

The Post- Modernist Fan Awakens

by John Purcell

Okay. What follows might need a bit of explanation. Suffice to say that my Doctoral classes in Education, research emphasis in Curriculum and Instruction, exposed my mind to an entirely new realm of whacked-out thought that passes as educational theory. Yet some of this stuff actually starts to make sense when you look at certain subjects. Science Fic- tion Fandom, especially what is called Core Fandom, is one such area that lends itself well to these mental musings. Herewith, I present some of my metacognitive perambulations on this subject.

But let’s get one thing straight. If it is one thing about fan writing that really ties my skivvies in knots, it is when fan writers start getting too serconish about themselves. You know what I mean. This is when those Secret Masters of Fan- dom start spouting mysterious nomenclature in smoke-filled, locked-door private room parties at cons in hopes of re- defining and redesigning fandom. This is what makes most of us run screaming in the other direction to hide behind twilltone rags, cringing in abject fear. So guess what, my gentle readers? You may want to start putting on your track shoes. Purcell’s about to go sercon here. Be very afraid.

What follows are two articles I wrote for my first e-zine, In a Prior Lifetime. The first section, in fact, appeared in the eighth issue in February 2006. The second preceded it by a semester. The reason why I decided to run these again in Askance is because recently I re-read Sam Moskowitz’s The Immortal Storm, and that got me to thinking about these articles, so I figured what the heck, why not reprint them? Also, besides being sort of interesting in a personal time- binding way, this is also a crackerjack means of adding page count to this issue. Whatever works. ------It has now been roughly 70 years since Robert Heinlein proclaimed that science fiction fans are “time- binders,” people who are able to tie past, present, and future together by being keenly aware of their origins. Anyone interested in pursuing this statement only has to merely read some of the fanzines archived on Bill Burns’ web site, www.efanzines.com , to come to an appreciation of Heinlein’s statement. Without question, fans are definitely interested in their past, probably to the point of being some of the most intelligent contributors to the discussion of the importance of the science fiction genre. In fact, fans seem to possess a basic in- stinct for the preservation of their contributions to the dialogue that comprises the science fiction genre. Be- cause of this, it is my contention that fans are, by their very nature, post-modern thinkers.

A definition of this term is helpful here. Post-Modernism is the train of thought that moves beyond what is complete. Many people associate Deconstructionism as part of Post-Modern philosophy, and they are right; 7

however, the two terms are not synonymous. Deconstructivist thought does not destroy completion, contrary to what many think, but takes completeness apart to find the incompleteness within itself so as to find other meanings. It is in the discovery of these under-meanings—or hidden meanings, if you will—that extends the post-modern dialogue. So with these definitions in mind, the question that comes to my befuddled mind is this: Are fans post-modernists?

The answer to that question may be a decided “yes.” Science fiction fans, especially those in what is known as Core Fandom, tend to be introspective and retrospective: they freely look into themselves and into shared common history, enabling themselves to reinterpret past and present history and events. This process results in creating a different future, perhaps preparing fandom for that future. A new question thus arises: Does this mean that we fans are attempting to predict our future? Perhaps we are. But then again, perhaps not. In one sense, I think we are all Futurians. Not Michelists (no, Great Ghu, no!), but as responsible humans greatly concerned with the future which we shall be inhabiting. To this end I believe that fans are willing to modify themselves in order to find new meanings of self. This is all part of the on-going dialogue that Core Fandom maintains, which can be traced all the way to its beginnings in the early 1930s.

While some critics may argue that fans really don’t want to change, but remain suspended in a perpetual state of child-like sense of wonder, it certainly seems to me that the aging of fandom has resulted in a maturation of fans’ views about themselves. Change is a constant in this world, and science fiction fans are no different from anybody else. Introspection does play a part in the process of change, and so does retrospection. We fans like to see where we have come from, so interested are we in the changes of our little corner of the universe. Or is our inclination to revisit the past simply a means of preserving our shared history? As more and more members of First Fandom sadly die off – to say nothing of Second and Third Fandoms – I think that Core Fandom is simply much more historically oriented than most other fan groups. Media Fandom, for example, is a relatively recent development compared to Core Fandom, dating its beginning roughly to the popularity of Star Trek and the sf movie boom of the Seventies thanks to the likes of Star Wars, E.T., and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. But Core Fandom, with its love of the printed word, its cons, and its intimate networking, is a unique entity among genre fan groups.

Brian M. Stableford mentioned this in his doctoral dissertation, The Sociology of Science Fiction (1978, published as a book by Borgo Press in 1987) when he discussed how science fiction writers are the envy of most other fiction writers because they have this intimate, well-read, and educated audience that is willing to dialogue with the professional writers. It is unique, and again, that key word so important to post-modernism and and deconstructive theory crops up in academic discourse: dialogue. It is therefore important to maintain this dialogue within and outside of ourselves. We are post-modernists who enjoy the dialogue. And funny thing: that dialogue is still going. Science fiction fans really do enjoy the conversation of fandom. ------And that is where that particular excursion went during one of my metacognitive musings on the social construct of science fiction fandom. The previous semester, in a graduate level sociology course, for one of the essay assignments - writing a classification essay in which you are to do a breakdown of a social community—it was a no-brainer for me to focus on the science fiction fandom community. The delineations between fan groups and perceived roles in fandom made for an easy essay—or so I thought. It turned out to be a bit harder to write, but I still had some fun with it. “Groups Within Groups” first appeared in In a Prior Lifetime #5 (Fall, 2005). Re-reading it ten years later, I think I would have given it a B+ grade. The professor obviously liked it better since she gave it an A grade. Then again, Dr. Cantremembername was a big Buffy, the Vampire Slayerfan. Go figure.

Groups Within Groups: applying the principle of classification and division to a science fiction club

Once upon a time, a very long time ago, in fact, there was this young man who stumbled into a strange and wondrous world of fantasy and impossible imaginings. At first, he did not know what to make of this world, which was inhabited by equally strange and wondrous people, some of whom were very smart, some who always took care of things, some who were interested in specific subjects, and others who seemed to have no clue as to what they were doing there except simply being there. But the most incredible thing happened to this young man: he discovered that he enjoyed being there with these people. For the first time in his life, he felt as if he actually belonged to a group, and that he was accepted without question, something that was completely new and refreshing to him.

That young man was myself back in my freshman year in college, spring semester, 1973, to be exact. Through my best friend from high school, I learned about the Minnesota Science Fiction Society, Inc., and began going to club meetings and local science fiction and fantasy conventions. Looking back on those years from the clarity of distance in terms of both time and space, it’s easy to see why I enjoyed being involved with Minn-stf (as it is known in abbreviated form), and to recognize the divisions within the group itself. For that matter, 20/20 hind- sight makes it very easy to understand why I gravitated to one particular sub-group within the larger context of the club itself. The best way to explain this is by applying the principle of classification and division to the club, and how by labeling groups and subgroups of people we can come to an understanding of how these la- bels enable such a large social organization to function as smoothly and efficiently as possible.

Before diving into the make-up of this particular science fiction club, the first thing that needs to be understood is the principle of classification and division itself. Basically, it is a form of coding, giving an identifiable label to items that share common characteristics. By either classifying things together by similarities or separating them by differences, it becomes possible to understand the bigger picture of which they are components by comparing patterns of similarity ordifference. It is very much like putting together a 1000-piece jigsaw puzzle. When you first open the box and dump out its contents, all you have is a big pile of individual pieces that don’t make sense, but you know that once you assemble them together in the proper manner, a comprehensible picture will emerge. So you begin by sorting the pieces out: the edge pieces go in one pile, all the grass pieces in another, the brown pieces into yet another, and so on until you begin assembling each separate pile, making matched sections, then attaching these to each other through a process known as coded recognition; patterns emerge, and these patterns enable a person to make connections between the once individual sections (the original piles of pieces) and put the whole picture together. The end result thus makes visual sense out of what once was a pile of unrecognizable parts.

The throbbing of the arteries [on the right and left side of the throat] is to be pressed.

In much the same way, the Minnesota Science Fiction Society, Inc., itself is a large pile of puzzle pieces, a subgroup belonging to a much larger puzzle subgroup of American society known as Science Fiction Fan- dom, a rather amorphous, pseudo-organized social clique that has now grown to titanic proportions compared to its founding back in the late 1920’s and early 1930’s. Since my focus in this paper is on Minn-stf itself, I will forego on a history of fandom at large to concentrate on the group being coded. Minn-stf began in the mid-1960’s on the campus of the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. From its small beginnings – not even a dozen members at first – it grew into a group that eventually, by 1980, was composed of over 150 members, hosted annual conventions, and gave birth to prominent science fiction and fantasy authors and poets, such as Steven Brust, Patricia C. Wrede, Emma Bull, Will Shetterly, Pam Dean, and Ruth Berman. Ages of group members ranged from infant (children of married and unmarried club members) to middle age; at one point, the group included Hugo Award winning authors Clifford Simak, J.G. Ballard, LoisMcMaster Bujold, and Gordon Dickson. As can be seen from this brief overview, besides finding mates and forming families, males and females enjoyed not only the social side of membership, but some members also achieved professional success.

This was the group that I entered in the spring of 1973, a large, thriving entity that was beginning to consume its membership because it was growing so fast. Out of necessity, sub-groups began to segment themselves underneath the parent umbrella organization. It is interesting to note that no-one seemed to mind being labeled as part of these sub-groups so long as they were still generally known as Minn-stfers; club membership had its perks, after all, when it came down to conventions, writing, publishing, and socializing.

So what are the classifications and divisions in the Minnesota Science Fiction Society? It can be assumed that there are many, and yes, such is definitely the case. As mentioned earlier, there are those who enjoy being in charge of things – this holds true in any social organization (the old “big fish in a small pond” syn- drome) – all the way down to those who simply enjoy being part of the group without con-tributing to the group (getting something out of nothing, so to speak). With this in mind, the club can be broken down in the following manner: authority fans, general club fans, fanzine fans, convention fans, media fans (as in television and movies), and fringe fans. There are naturally more subgroups involved, such as comic book fans, Star Trek fans, and so forth, but for the sake of brevity, members of Minn-stf can be coded, or placed, into one of these six major club segments. What I will do is give a brief commentary on each segment, and then attempt to explain how they work together.

1. Authority fans. These fans are fairly easy to identify. They are always in need of being in charge of “something”; so long as they are running the show, and getting their egos stroked in the process, they’re happy. This is a relatively harmless bunch of people who are very necessary for keeping any kind of an organization running – at least until they start taking themselves too seriously, and then it gets dodgy. Interesting- ly, this group tends to rotate positions of authority—president/vice-president/treasurer/secretary—on a regular basis, which means the same people are usually in some position of authority (read: power) for a long period of time. This is not necessarily a bad thing because it does provide stability and easily retains the status quo of the club, freeing up other members to pursue other interests.

2. General club fans. Like the word “general” implies, these members of the club can be found virtually anywhere in the club; for the most part, they enjoy being involved in various aspects of the group, such as volunteering to work on a local convention, host a club meeting at their house, possibly even organize a movie expedi- tion to see the latest Harry Potter movie, or things of that nature. This is a very affable group whose members can and do mingle with other sub-groups in the overall club.

3. Fanzine fans This title requires a bit of explanation. A “fanzine” is a shortened version of “fan magazine,” which is produced by fans for other fans. As a result, a fanzine can be a reflection of the person or group that produces it. There are many different types of fanzines, such as clubzines (RUNE is the official publication of the Minnesota Science Fiction Society, Inc.), perzines (personal fanzines), genzines (general fanzines), and those particular to a specific topic, such as trekzines (Star Trek fandom) and apazines (produced for amateur press associations). Fanzine fans generally hang together at larger social gather- ings, such as conventions, enjoy seeing their name in print, and cross-pollinate in terms of writing for and about other fanzines. It is a very self-generating group, and can also be an expensive, time- consuming hobby; the advent of e-zines (electronic on-line fanzines) has helped alleviate the time and money crunch of fanzine production.

4. Convention fans These fans, which are legion, enjoy attending and running science fiction and fantasy conventions. Not surprisingly, there are again many different types of conventions that these fans attend the following: local, regional, national conventions (or cons, for short); comic book cons; Star Trek and Star Wars cons (more on this in a moment); plus strictly fantasy cons, international cons, fanzine cons, and so forth. The list is virtually endless. Minn-stf enjoys a central location in the heart of the American Midwest, and the convention fans of the club can be found at conventions all over that region of the United States, and also at national cons as well. Con fans tend to be a gregarious lot, love to party, and generally hold down well- paying jobs since traveling requires a relatively healthy bank account.

John Herz, longtime LASFS and convention fan 5. Media fans As intimated above, these are fans whose main interest lies in a specific subject, such as the megalithic Star Wars and Star Trek phenomena, or smaller yet quite popular movies and television shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Lost in Space, Twilight Zone, and Logan’s Run. These are the fans who really get into their subject, quite often producing fanzines based on their special interest, design and wear costumes inspired by this show, and running conventions devoted to the movie or show in question. In fact, some of the largest science fiction conventions ever held have been Star Trek conventions, frequently surpassing the 10,000 – attendance mark. Minn-stf has a large number of media fans, but nothing like the numbers found in major metropolitan areas such as New York, Los Angeles, Chi- cago, and Miami. The problem with media fans is that a large percentage of them tend to be fringe fans, which is the last group to be discussed here.

6. Fringe fans These science fiction and fantasy fans come crawling out of the woodwork on rare occasions, usually when a convention occurs in a geographically convenient location. While they may actually enjoy watching science fiction and fantasy movies and television shows, even reading books of this genre, they are not seen on a regular basis in an organized club, such as Minn-stf, and thus never assume any roles of leadership or responsibility necessary to keep a club afloat. As long as there is an occasional outlet for fringe fans to take advantage of, which they do (conventions are a prime example of this, which could be the subject of an entire study by itself), they will intermittently emerge from their lairs. All of these subgroups reveal an inner networking between them; even within these subgroups, people will emerge as authority and organization figures, general volunteers, writers and publishers, and spe- cialists in a particular subject, and there is a lot of overlap between these subgroups. A case in point: one of the major regional conventions held annually is Minicon, This is Minn-stf’s official club- sponsored convention that has been held once or twice every year since 1970. Minicon has grown in size from a few dozen in attendance to well over three thousand, and now features programming rang- ing from the general (a new fan’s guide to fandom) to the specific (misogyny in pulp magazines of the 1940’s – I believe this was a real panel discussion topic at Minicon 27 in 1992), and includes a well- run operations that oversees two film/media rooms, art show, dealer’s rooms, a masquerade ball, music, dance, multi-tracked panel programming, a gaming room, the main convention hospitality suite, publications, publicity, and all the minutiae needed to make the convention run smoothly. Minicon has grown into a bit of a monster, but has managed to maintain its identity and a well-developed sense of humor.

All in all, by identifying the divisions within a large group of people like Minn-stf, it becomes apparent that it is necessary for these subdivisions to emerge in order for the larger entity to not only survive, but to maintain a standard of operation so that club members can know what’s going on in the club and where meetings and local events are happening. Without the authority fans holding it together, without the general fans helping out when they can, without the fanzine fans writing things down and publishing information, without the convention fans, without the media fans, and even without the fringe-fans, there would be no Minnesota Science Fiction Society, Inc. These are all necessary organs for the body of the club to thrive and grow; one is the head, another the arms, legs, feet, and hands, still others are the mouth and ears, and so forth. Put them all together and you have a very interesting glimpse into a subculture of modern American society. Is it a monster? No, but when this benign behemoth rises up and begins striding forward, one might very well run screaming into the night the phrase, “It lives!”

Two Novels by Francis Stevens

by Randy Byers

Francis Stevens was the pen name of Gertrude Barrows Bennett — a figure of some mystery who wrote for the pulps from 1917 to 1923 while caring for her sick mother and young daughter and then, after her mother died, stopped writing and more or less disappeared from the face of the earth, even losing contact with her own daughter. Her weird fiction, largely published in the Munsey magazines (she was another discovery of Bob Davis'), has frequently been cited as an influence on the developing genres of the fantastic. It appears that the admiring quote about her novel Citadel of Fear that's still widely attributed to H.P. Lovecraft was not in fact written by him. It was written by someone named August T. Swift, which was long wrongly thought to be a pseudonym of Lovecraft's, but still, it's easy to see why people think she was an influence on him. Apparently for many years Francis Stevens was thought to be a pseudonym of A. Merritt's, and this was only debunked in the '50s, but again it's easy to see the similarities in their approach to science fantasy and The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction categorically states that he "was aware early of her work, was influenced by it, and ... praised her straightforwardly." Whatever the case, Stevens remained a name to be conjured with amongst the cognoscenti of the fantasy pulps, and the fact that her work has been reprinted a number of times over the years attests to a continuing admiration, even if this has never led to fame. After reading The Nightmare and Other Tales of Dark Fantasy, which collects almost all of the fiction that has never or rarely been reprinted, I was left with the impression that Stevens was a kind of out- sider artist who used genre tropes in eccentric ways, perhaps due to her inexperience as a writer, and wasn't always in complete control of her material. Now having read the two novels she is perhaps most famous for, I've revised my impression. These are both supremely accomplished pulp adventure novels in which she exhibits full control of the tropes and material. If they are somewhat eccentric, it's in the way that she blends genres, although she was writing at a time when the pulp magazines were still only on the verge of specializing into specific genres of the fantastic such as horror and science fiction. But in terms of the skills of the writer, these novels seem superior to me than anything written by, for example, Homer Eon Flint, who was writing at the same time for the same magazines. Her imagination is similarly outrageous, too, although it runs more toward the occult and the weird than Flint's did.

Citadel of Fear was serialized in The Argosy magazine in September and October 1917. (I read the 1984 paperback from Caroll & Graf.) It's a remarkable novel that starts out as a lost world story set in Mexico. Two American gold miners — one a big bull of an Irishman, who is the protagonist, and the other a clever sneak, who is the antagonist — are lost in the Mexican desert when they stumble upon a mysterious hacienda. Soon they are taken to an underground city inhabited by pre-Toltec giants. A conflict amongst this strange race results in our hero being expelled from the hidden city. The action then moves forward fifteen years, when our hero visits his sister and her husband in the sub- urbs of a large city in the Eastern US. Soon the household is under attack from bizarre and mysterious creatures, and the main suspect is a sinister man who lives in a walled compound and claims to be breeding livestock. What he's really up to is much more out- landish than that, of course, and the novel climaxes in a supernatural conflict. 14

Citadel of Fear is a conventional story in many ways, with a manly man as the hero (which is not always the case in Ste- vens' work) and an early form of the manic pixie dream girl as his love interest. The lost world section of the story is fascinating for the way it creates its exotic pre-Columbian fantasy world, in which ancient Mexican gods vie for power. The action bogs down a bit in the middle part of book, as perhaps too much futile coming-and-going and vague bumpings in the night and comical-skeptical detectives prolong the slow reveal of what then becomes a wonderfully grotesque premise leading to the finale. As others have commented, if the early parts bear the imprint of H. Rider Haggard and Edgar Rice Burroughs, there's more than a little bit of H.G. Wells' Island of Dr Moreau in the latter part of the book, although this is more science fantasy than science fiction when push comes to shove. It's here that Stevens' grotesque imagination is set free, and there is a nightmare quality to the climax that still carries quite a charge. It's also fascinating how Stevens retains a conflicted, mixed perspective of skepticism, Christianity, and paganism in the denouement, with a slight emphasis on the latter that seems a hallmark of the fantasy genre. The Heads of Cerberus was serialized in The Thrill Book magazine in August through October 1919. (I read the 1952 hard- back collectors edition from Polaris Press.) The Thrill Book was a short-lived attempt to publish a magazine specializing in the fantastic, and Stevens apparently sold them other stories that were lost when the magazine quickly folded. This novel begins in contemporary Philadelphia when another big bull of an Irish-American finds his friend blacked out from a blow to the head in an upstairs bedroom. Soon we learn about an ancient crystal vial with a Cerberus-headed stopper and supposedly containing dust of magical properties. When the dust is poured out, the two men and the Irishman's sister (where have we seen this trio of characters before?) are transported first to a weird twilight fan- tasyland and then to a dystopian Philadelphia of two centuries in the future. Satirical and yet cracking adventures ensue, with a wonderfully un- settled resolution in which the transformative dust disappears with a gen- tleman of uncertain intentions.

The Heads of Cerberus is touted as possibly the first alternate world story. What's interesting to me about this aspect of the story is that the alternate Philadelphia ends up being specifically a kind of imaginary world even within the story itself. It isn't so much a parallel world as one that is conjured up by the imaginations of the protagonists, and thus it becomes a kind of metaphor for science fiction itself: a futurological work of the imagination. I also found it interesting that the rationalization for how this other world was created/reached was strikingly reminiscent of the rationalization for the parallel world in The Blind Spot by Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint, which was serialized in Argosy All-Story in 1921. Hall is usually credited for the occult aspects of that hybrid novel, and it must be said that Stevens handles the occult material much more competently than Hall does. Still, both novels have occult and science fictional aspects, and I'm not enough of a scholar of the era to surmise whether it's a matter of influence or of common practice in the pulps in those days.

Both of these novels are available in etexts, but I've read that a lot of the e-versions of Citadel of Fear don't include the whole novel, so be sure to dig a bit before you download one. Last time I checked, neither novel was available at the Gutenberg Project, and I think I only found one work by Stevens there. Another sign, perhaps, that she is still underval- ued. Whether she was influential or not, her stories and novels strike me as more than worthy to be included in the ros- ter of forgotten writers mentioned in the jacket copy of Polaris Press: "Some of these old masters of fantasy — and there are many others — were A. Merritt, Murray Leinster, Homer Eon Flint, Ray Cummings, Garrett P. Serviss, J.U. Giesy and Francis Stevens." For me she joins Serviss and Flint as previously unknown writers of early science fiction who are worth exploring in depth..

- Randy Byers 15

Fanzine Reviews

Generally speaking, the fanzine universe continues to spin merrily along. In fact, over at our favorite repository of online fanzines, efanzines.com, Bill Burns has been adding a fair amount of new and archived fanzines as folks send them in for posting. One can get RSS feeds from that site by signing on for those notifications on the homepage: simply click on the subscribe link and add in your necessary contact information and you will be good to go. You can even follow efanzines on Twitter, for chrissakes! Again, click on the homepage link for that account.

Welcome to the world of science fiction fanzines in the 21st century.

My life has become quite busy, so much so that it has been hard to keep up on writing letters of comment to all the zines I would like to respond to with my pithy and/or sordid repartee. The combination of being a college English professor, husband, parent, and now add grandparent to my existential resume, and there sometimes is very little free time to indulge in writing locs, let alone taking the time to produce fanzines. Yet I do. At least my life isn’t boring.

Therefore, what I am going to do here is simply list out – in no particular order, as will be readily apparent by the lack of alphabetization – the fanzines that I have recently read. Some of them still arrive in the mail, so those paper zines are listed as such. The vast majority of the remainder are available at efanzines.com, but I also receive a few fanzines emailed directly: MT Void, Einblatt, and the Newsletter of the Middle Tennessee Science Fiction Society (a.k.a., the Nashville sf club) – which really needs a snappy clubzine title. I do print out copies of the shorter titles (as in, less than 30 pages) for easy reading and reference, but the gigantic titles, like SF Commentary and Challenger, remain in electronic format just because the rain forests need to be preserved. Then again, should I print out copies of Askance, there go another dozen acres of habitat. Oh, well. One of these days I’ll strike a balance between the urge to have tan- gible, hard copies to read and file, and simply go completely electronic in order to save the world.

Such is the dilemma of the modern, stone-age fanzine fan.

Paper fanzines

Alexiad #82 – Joe & Lisa Major, 1409 Christy Avenue; Louisville, KY 40204-2040 USA [email protected]

Banana Wings #60 – Claire Brialey & Mark Plummer, 59 Shirley Road, Croydon, Surrey CR) 7ES, United Kingdom. Email at [email protected]

The Reluctant Famulus #107 – Tom Sadler, 305 Gill Branch Rd., Owenton, KY 40359 email: [email protected].

Tetragrammatron Fragments #240 - Rob Imes, 13510 Cambridge #307, Southgate, MI 48195 email at [email protected]

16 e-zines (most are available at http://efanzines.com unless noted otherwise)

The Art of Garthness #7, Garth Spencer, ed.4240 Perry Street, Vancouver, BC CANADA V5N 3X5. Breaking it all Down #8. Alex Case, email address: [email protected]

Broken Toys #43 – Taral Wayne, 2 45 Dunn Ave., Toronto, Ontario, M6K 1S6, Canada. Email address: [email protected].

BCSFAzine #509, Felicity Walker, [email protected] or Apartment 601, Manhattan Tower, 6611 Cooney Road, Rich- mond, BC, Canada, V6Y 4C5 (new address).

CounterClock #25, Wolf Von Witting, Via Dei Banduzzi 6/4, 33050 Bagnaria Arsa (Ud) - Italia Email: [email protected]

CyberCozen #323 (Vol. XXVII, No. 11) - Leybl Botwinik, [email protected]

Enter at Your Own Risk #4, Chuck Connor, 85 The Paddocks, Stevenage, SG2 9UF, United Kingdom. Email address: [email protected]

Fornax#6 – Charles Rector, available on efanzines.com . email him at [email protected]

Journey Planet #25 –James Bacon, Michael Carroll, Chris Garcia, editors. Available on efanzines.com; no contact information given inside. No email listing of the editors, but - [email protected] can always be used in a pinch.

17 O nobly-born, listen undistractedly.

MT Void #1870-1887 – Mark & Evelyn Leeper (on www.fanac.org website), email them at mleep- [email protected] and [email protected] to get on their direct emailing list.

The National Fantasy Fan, Vol. 74, No. 11. George Phillies, editor. 48 Hancock Hill Drive, Worcester MA 01609 USA. Email address: phil- [email protected]

Opuntia #327 – Dale Speirs, opun- [email protected] Calgary, Alberta, Canada

SF Commentary #90. Bruce Gillespie, 5 Howard Street, Greensborough, VIC 3088, Australia. Email address: [email protected].

Spartacus #10. Guy H. Lillian III. 1390 Holly Ave., Merritt Island FL 32952 USA. Or, [email protected]

The V-Con Vanguard #1. Produced by Garth Spencer, this is PR #1 for V-Con #41, slated for September 30 – October 2, 2016 in Vancou- ver, British Columbia, Canada.

Vibrator #2.0.21, Graham Charnock, 45 Kimber- ley Gardens, London N4 1LDF United Kingdom Email the bugger at gra- [email protected]

The Zine Dump #36. Guy H. Lillian III, 1390 Holly Ave., Merritt Island FL 32952 USA. Or, [email protected]

From the Hinterlands

Once again, we dive into the nonexistent headwaters of nowhere and see what assorted readers of this fanzine have decided to comment upon. First off, it is catch-up time. Thanks to the vagaries of the Computer Ghods—and whimsical they can certainly be—two loc-writers noted that missives they had penned to the 33rd issue were not published, nor even noted as We Also Heard From (the infamous WAHF listing). To correct that oversight, both Lloyd Penney and Milt Stevens then re- sent those earlier comments, so the lettercolumn begins with those.

1706-24 Eva Rd. Etobicoke, ON CANADA M9C 2B2

May 9, 2015

Many thanks for the latest issue of Askance, no. 33. You're just cruising along with this title, and hard to believe you're at issue 33 already. Time to whip up a few comments, and send them your way.

The passing of Peggy Rae was terrible to read. Yvonne and I knew her only from Worldcons and a Smofcon or two. I think at the time, in the 80s and 90s, Yvonne and I were among the few Canadians to help out as best as we could with Worldcons, and we'd run into her either onsite or through any of the committee publications, such as Noreascon 3's Mad 3 Party.

I wasn't aware of any schism between book review fandom and fanzine fandom; I seem to be so out of the loop these days, so I am not really surprised. However, I find that I can't really comment on book reviews, but I do read them in order to keep a little up to date as to who the big-name authors are these days. I rarely have time to read as much as I'd like, but at least I'm keeping my finger in. I am sure I'm like many people in that I barely recognize modern SF, and in some ways, modern fandom, such as it is.

Good fanzine reviews. I definitely enjoy Wolf von Witting's CounterClock, and he blames me for its continuance, blame I will happily shoulder. Good zines need all the encouragement they can get; in fact, all zines need it.

Milt Stevens' loc...my first encounter with any intentional group we might call a fandom was the Ontario DX Associa- tion, listeners to shortwave radio. Currently a similar group I belong to is the local Murdoch Mysteries group. Our fandom is not unique, but it does have a very high level of intricacy. 20

My loc...look at the date on that! I must have typoed the date, pretty typical for me. Frostcon and Ad Astra were good conventions, and we have four more cons coming at which we have a table. We did get a table at Anime North for this year, and the steampunk con in Michigan went away. And, the steampunk gala in London was just the best time. Work...still at the job started last September. Yvonne is still at the job she started last year, and we finally have some financial stability. We continue to save for a trip to London, and have decided to go next year.

My quote...I wish I was wrong. We do timebind, but we look back fondly, and at some point fail to look forward with hope.

The 2016 CorFlu will be in Chicago. Well, that is down the highway, but I will have to say no. At least it should get a lot of members through the Chicago airline hub.

I am going to get it ready, John and fire it off to you in the hope that it will suit your locol. Take care, and as soon as I can find a suitable photograph of me and Yvonne in costume, I will send it along. We may have some opportunities later on this year.

Yours, Lloyd

{Well, better re-mailed than never works for me, and I thank you for the comments. In particular, I have no idea if a rift exists between book review fandom and fanzine fandom; it seems to me that any kind of review is worth including in a zine. Whether or not an editor wants to eschew reviews is that person’s view.(*) Since Peggy Rae Pavlat’s passing, fandom has lost two other major figures, Ned Brooks and Don West. This is sadly going to happen as the SF community ages, but I for one consider ourselves blessed to have had them as part of our lives for a long time. Their contributions remain and they shall all live on in our memories. (*) The Chicago Corflu is a possibility for me, but that all depends on tim- ing (Finals Week, again) and funding (as always) mainly because MidAmeriCon II in Kansas City, MO is the big event of 2016. }

{And now, here’s the old Milt Stevens loc on Askance #33.}

6325 Keystone St. Simi Valley, CA 93063

April 22, 2015

In Askance #33, I was about to say that Greg Benford’s article “NeO-CLASSICAL ES- CHATOLOGICAL BIFURCATION IN DOC SAVAGE: SOME ASPECTS”was more truth than poetry. Then I started thinking about the bardic tradition. If you chanted this title with the right beat, you might have something. It could be quite an experience if you add some drums and chant it while dancing around a fire.

As an undergraduate English major, I sometimes thought of what I was doing as jargon splicing. It’s as if the jargon exists in snippets on dominoes. If you just put them in the right order, it might mean something. At one point, I stopped in the middle of a paper when I realized I didn’t know what I was talking about myself. Jargon is insidious stuff. It can crawl in your ears and eat your brains. They say that chanting Hare Krishna over and over and over again can cause your mind to collapse. Jargon can do the same thing, but it takes longer.

My favorite movie monster? Generally, I don’t like revisionist fiction. Revisionist fiction involved taking the character names from another work and adding an entirely different story to them. For that reason, I usually avoid things like the rebooted Star Trek. When I heard Neil Gaiman was dong the script for a new version of Beowulf I was interested. Then I heard Angelina Jolie was going to be in the movie. I laughingly wondered if she was going to play Gredel’s mother. I was flabbergasted to learn that she was.Gaiman made her a great monster. She seduces the evil out of men and sends it back against them. It’s sort of Oedipus sideways. 21

We did meet in San Antonio. You were sitting out in the middle of a vast wilderness they had designated as the fanzine lounge. I dropped by for a chat at some point in the convention. {I do remember that. My mind may have been wan- dering a bit because during the first two days of LSC 3 I was mostly worried about my wife’s health.}

If WorldCon committees can’t do more for a fanzine lounge than was done in San Antonio, I don’t know why they both- er doing anything at all. I’ve thought of the idea of some of us throwing in some money to rent a suite and run our own fanzine lounge during the WorldCon. We probably could raise the money, but there would be logistic prob- lems. You really need boots on the ground in the WorldCon city to get the supplies for such an operation. Usually, the worldcon committee recruits all the bodies in the host city for their own multifarious purposes. It’s still a thought.

Milt Stevens

{It remains to be seen if I will ever run/host a WorldCon fanzine lounge again, but I might. Who knows? I was asked by the MAC II events department heads if I would be interested, but had to respectfully decline because at that time, Va- lerie and I were unsure if we’d be able to attend. Those odds are looking much, much more likely now. Now I really do like the idea of renting a hotel suite for the length of the WorldCon as the fanzine lounge. How feasible that is remains to be seen, but cost is the primary deciding factor, I think, and the logistics can be worked out as needed. An intriguing proposal.}

{And now, we are caught up with old correspondence—I hope—so onward to letters received on issue #34, which contained Taral Wayne’s thoughts about the shapes of space ships, both real and imagined, my musings about Steampunk literature, fanzines, and other doo-dads.}

6325 Keystone St. Simi Valley, CA 93063 [email protected]

August 13, 2015

In Askance #34, Taral’s article made me realize I had never thought much about the shape of space ships. When I was a kid I accepted the streamlined design for rock- ets as natural. Later, it was mentioned that rocket designs were rather Freudian in addition to being aerodynamic. Despite a few embarrassed giggles, rocket design stayed much the same. I suppose the traditional flying saucer design must say something about alien sexuality, but I don’t really want to think about it.

The idea of hollowing out asteroids and using them as interstellar colony ships might actually be used someday. A voy- age of decades isn’t so bad if you can live a reasonably normal life for the entire trip. Several steps up from this idea is the Ship in Robert Reed’s series. It’s a planetary sized object that’s built like a Swiss cheese . The Ship has been or- biting the galaxy for hundreds of thousands of years, and various races have come and gone during that period. This is about as far as you can go with the idea of a spaceship. The Puppeteers in Larry Niven’s Known Space Series take their home planet and leave the galaxy. That doesn’t seem like a ship any longer.

Reading the Girl Genius series is about as much experience as I have with steam punk. There is so much available material these days that there are many things I am never going to get around to reading. I wonder a little about the – punk suffix for sub-genres. We’ve had cyber punk and steam punk. Maybe they both fantasize and area of technology. Real life punks are red neck thugs who have just about no redeeming social value.

Recently, I read The Mechanical by Ian Tregillis. I read it because it was on the NESFA recommended reading list for 2015. In the novel, alchemy is a form of magic that has been used to imbue clockwork men with consciousness. 22

Somehow, this seems like cheating. There was lots of hocus-pocus in alchemy, but it really wasn’t magic. I got the feel- ing the author wasn’t playing by any rules whatsoever. This novel is supposed to be the first in a series of indeterminate length. It didn’t grab my interest, so I’m sure a series wouldn’t interest me.

Milt Stevens {One of the things that Steampunk literature extols—and many writers take advantage of this feature—is that anything goes; that is, Steampunk is a mash-up of science fiction, fantasy, folk legends, alternate history, and even western genres, and in my opinion some writers lose control of the world-building such a construct requires. Steampunk can definitely be an amalgam of all sorts of things, but to be successfully written and executed a writer must be completely in control, otherwise the focus of the story gets lost. Based on your reaction, it sounds like that’s what happened in The Me- chanical. Too bad. The premise sounded decent.}

{Hey, it’s dueling loc-writers! Here comes Lloyd Penney again. After him, there is a wider assortment of correspondents. I hope.}

1706-24 Eva Rd. Etobicoke, ON CANADA M9C 2B2

August 22, 2015

August has meant a true deluge of zines into my IN box, or through eFanzines.com. I am responding to them asap, and coming up next is Askance 34. Wish me luck as I dive in.

We have finally had a handful of days where were have surpassed 30C, or 86F. So, we have indeed had a typical hot summer here, although we usually have more of those 30C+ days. I am sure we've had triple-digit temperatures of our own, although it's been a very long time. We must all keep in mind that summer does NOT end when the kids go back to school, but not until the third week in September, and early fall can be very nice. Yvonne and I have had autumn picnics, so as far as I am concerned, it's summer until the snow flies.

Spaceship design is a field I hope we will be able to excel in in the (not too) distant future. Popular culture have given us the big fins and saucer shapes, and it might have been an amalgam of shapes that gave us the very familiar USS Enter- prise shape. I know that NASA is very influenced by the saucer shape, and the idea of a bridge to walk onto, but practi- cality won't stand for such a ship. (Indeed, RIP to Leonard Nimoy and Grace Lee Whitney. Some of our number hate Trek, but yet, it can't be denied how much this old 60s show has influenced our favorite literature. Deforest Kelley, Mark Lenard, Gene Roddenberry, Majel Barrett and Jimmy Doohan predeceased them, and Bill Shatner, George Takei, Walter Koenig and Nichelle Nichols are still with us. Long life and remembrance to them.)

I admit I haven't read much steampunk literature, but I freely admit that the costumes are what brought me and Yvonne into steampunk. In the 80s, Yvonne and I would compete in Worldcon masquerades, and we did win a few prizes. (Look up the Royal Canadian Mounted Starfleet. That was us.) It was politics that drove us out in the late 80s, but we have always been in touch with local costumers. Our steampunk costumes have won a few prizes, too. It has been a pleasure to return, to simply take part and not compete.

Yvonne always made our costumes back then. She is a skilled dressmaker, seamstress and tailor, and has recently taken classes in pattern drafting; there is always something new to learn. With Steampunk, she's made a few items, and created a Queen Victoria costume that she has already revised, but for me, I can now put together interesting combinations of everyday or vintage clothes myself to create steampunk costumes. The best part of steampunk costuming is that there are no set characters to try to look like.

The vintage clothes for men are also a real education of what men used to wear. French cuffs, tab collars, collar pins, tussy-mussies, smoking jackets, top hats, derbies, British pith helmets...again, there is always something new to learn. What is the appeal of steampunk? I think the human race misses the idea of exploration and discovery. The world is nearly completely known and uncov- ered. If only another dark continent could suddenly be revealed. The intrigue and excitement of finding something new...that's what it's about. New lands, new technologies, new applications...we've jumped back about 110 years, and that was a time of adventure and new tech, thanks to Edison and Tesla. If only we could un- cover a huge new basic technology to put some romance in our lives again. As Wolf von Witting said in the locol, humans need mystery...

Next month is a big steampunk event, and we've purchased what is basically the Everything package. The 2015 Grand Canadian Steampunk Exposition takes place in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, literally right on the edge of the border. Music guests are Abney Park, Steam-Powered Giraffe, Jardin Mechanique and Professor Elemental, and we were be im- mersed in all the steamy good we can handle for a very full weekend. Looking forward to it, and should have lot of pho- tos.

I am done...the steampunk part got me going, I guess. Many thanks for this issue, and will look forward to the next.

Lloyd Penney

{For us, it was also the costuming and music that drew us into Steampunk—Valerie more than I, at first—but reading the stories came right on their heels. Valerie is the visual artist in our household, and like Yvonne, she is also a skilled seamstress and makes both of our costumes. She enjoys doing it, except when gearing up for art shows and she is nowhere near ready with her artwork and jewelry, so she ends up staying up late every night trying to finish as much as she can before packing it all up for dragging off to a con or event. Situation normal, of course.}

{It has been awhile since I have heard from Eric Mayer, but thankfully he felt moved enough to write. WARNING: Base- ball natter ahead!}

Eric Mayer

August 18, 2015

Enjoyed Askance as usual, but lately I seem to be suffering from loccing dysfunction. Which doesn't make me different from practically all of your other readers, judging from the loccol.

If you want a decent response, but can't afford to do print copies, you need to send Askance directly to a mailing list as an attached pdf. Believe me. Try it. For years I resisted this advice because it made me uncomfortable pushing my zine on people. On the Internet generally that's considered spamming. So I did a year of E-Ditto and a year of Revenant, simply uploading them to eFanzines and elicited a long, loud silence. Then last December, as you know, I threw together some apa articles I'd written during the year and finally broke down and sent the collection out as an attachment as people had been telling me to do all along. Heard from more than half of those I sent it to! Unfortunately I already ex- hausted my ideas for fanzines in E-Ditto and Revenant. Askance certainly deserves more response. Try the direct mailing method. I had no complaints from anyone. 24

Since I rarely read current sf I haven't read much steampunk. I keep telling myself I ought to, but my list of "ought to reads" is already about fifty reading years long. I did read one of Jay Lake's clockwork world series and, to be honest, I found the premise a lot more intriguing then the actual story. There was a monstrous wall, at least. They've long been a staple of the genre which I always liked and for a couple of decades I've had my own monster wall idea but I suppose I don't dare ever try to use it now that everyone figures George R.R. Martin invented it. A couple months back I read Michael Moorcock's A Warlord of the Air which is cited as proto-steampunk and I liked that. My only other recent sf read -- in fact the last thing I read -- was Catseye by Andre Norton. She was my first favorite sf author back in grade school and it was fun to experience a bit of that old gosh-wow I felt upon first encountering telepathic animals.

Taral on the shape of spaceships to come made for an interesting read. I always have had a difficult time associating the outside of Starship Enterprise with what is shown of the interior. Could be the best way to travel to another star system would be to figure out how to keep a habitable planet sunlit in interstellar space and move the whole planet.

The Twins are good and bad news. The good news being that they are still in the playoff race which one expected; the bad news being that they've been slumping badly. I came across one writer who figures the Twins might emulate the Mets next year: http://nypost.com/2015/08/15/the-next-mets-5-teams-that-can-rise-out-of-mlb-hell-in-2016/

The way things are now with the playoffs, and how unpredictable baseball teams can be from game to game compared to, say football or basketball teams, I figure what fans should hope for is teams staying in the race to make the season more entertaining. Once you make it to the playoffs it's a roll of the dice. So both the Twins and Yankees are managing that.

Of course today the Twins are salivating over that hitters' treat, C.C. Sabathia.

Eric Mayer

{Baseball natter first. The season is over, and the Twins hung in the playoff picture until the second to last day, losing out to the eventual World Series champion Kansas City Royals. What is interesting here is that last month (November) Minnesota traded Aaron Hicks (a centerfielder with promise, but very inconsistent at the plate and in the field) to the New York Yankees for a pitcher (who should fit in nicely out in the bullpen) and a top prospect. We shall see.

{Now for the fannish stuph. I tried your suggestion on the direct e-mailing route, and that has definitely produced results. Thank you for the suggestion. From here on out the plan will be to initially e-mail a completed .PDF issue to a fanzine group I have assembled into a file on my account, then send the .PDF to Bill Burns for posting at efanzines. So far, so good.}

Steve Jeffery

September 11, 2015

Thanks for Askance.

One other thot on Taral's article on design. If the ship is manned then radiation shielding might play a large part in the practicalities of the design. Nice to see a picture of FireballXL5 after all these years. I grew up on that, and SuperCar before it, long before Dr Who. (Oh yes, space (and time)ship design as a small blue police box. TW missed that one.)

And there's also the enclosed 'Eden project' garden in Silent Running.

It would be interesting to look at this subject from magazine and book cover artwork fashions over time. I suspect there would be lots of phallic shapes with pointy fins in the 40s and 50s which change to what look like gigantic blocks of coloured Lego during the Chris Foss era of the 60s and 70s.

I notice your cat is a steampunk fan as well, sleeping on a copy of Cherie Priest's Boneshaker. I just found a new Blay- lock in the library (whoohoo). Looking forward to that - despite the publisher's weird decision to print the whole book in pale brown ink. That takes me back to when we first discovered steampunk v1.0, in the 1980s novels of Blaylock, Jeter and Powers (Homunculus, The Digging Leviathan.) and onto Gibson and Sterling's The Difference Engine (I must re -read that some time).

I noticed there was a new KSR novel out.

I'm not so sure, as Greg Benford seems to imply, that the Great Problem of sf is the alien. Unless he means problem in the sense that it is so hard to convincingly depict alienness rather than as a human in a funny hat. Or that is what puts most people off sf in the first place. KSR has more of a frontier mentality. Had he lived in an earlier age, I suspect his books would be about pioneers in Conestoga wagons opening up the West. There's a feel about that in the Mars trilo- gy. Aurora doesn't sound exactly a fun read, but perhaps a gripping one.

I know where you're coming from in your closing thoughts about the Hugo/Puppies affair, but once you've been bur- gled, it's wise to change the locks so it doesn't happen again.

Steve Jeffery

{Wise words at the end there, Steve. I know what you mean. (*) Kim Stanley Robinson is my favourite hard SF writer at the moment, although I do like what Alastair Reynolds, Gregory Benford, and David Brin write, too. Robinson’s stories and characters seem very realistic to me, and that’s probably why I will probably enjoy Aurora when I eventually get around to reading that novel. And speaking of good hard SF writers, a couple months ago I read Andy Weir’s The Mar- tian and was very impressed by how Weir incorporated the hard science into the narrative, all the while making the character of Mark Watney so incredibly human. That kind of an impressive debut novel is going to make his next book a real challenge. The Martian is going to be a very hard act to follow. Andy Weir has a ton of potential.}

{Alright. Would somebody be so kind as to tell me why all but two locs received came from outside the United States? Was it something I said? Something I didn’t say? Maybe if I awarded a beer to the first five respondents would entice folks. No, I fear I would still get more overseas loc-writers. *sigh* }

September 26, 2015

I seem to have sent a loc to Askance33. I have not commented on 34. This should fix that.

Benford had a good review. Watch as I cleverly switch to soapbox mode. Our current planet has three eco systems, hard to say which one is the primary (first one) and since they were only discovered recently it makes the idea of know- ing enough about our own to attempt a transplant a real problem to solve first. I seem to recall that an attempt to en- capsulate our own system in a self contained habitat was a horrid failure. That was caused by our lack of knowledge

about how things work. writers can hand-wave around this for a cracking good tail of derring-do, but shutting yourself into a can for a long time needs careful examination of the consequences first.

One example of poor understanding is that Earth oceans have to receive a shower of microscopic iron particles from outer space to remain viable. So those fireworks displays by meteorites turn out to be part of the system, not just pretty lights in the sky.

Since humans are analogous to a tubeworm with a complex internal forest living in symbiosis, what happens when a key part of that dies off and you can no longer depend on getting it from the environment ? Does your Martian colony ask for an express rocket shipment of excrement to smear on the walls of their dome or do they die off like the Greenlanders who prayed for God to save them while living in an area with abundance of food? Accessing the food required a change in lifestyle so they did the normal thing when faced with a choice: they starved to death.

Every generation is faced with the same dilemma. You inherit a culture you had no part in making and no choice to opt out. If you rise in revolt you will be pounded into some semblance of submission. This is not a consequence of those doing the pounding having a better plan or a vision they are going towards. All it is is a reaction to the whole idea of any change. They are not about to notice changes like the increase of the poor because you cannot club those changes out of existence like you can when someone proposes a modest tax on the wealthy. That's an idea that can be clubbed into silence.

It is like the presentation of paper money as an idea to Ghenghis Khan by Ye Lui Chutsi. Temujin said, " This won't work, no one is that stupid. just giving up their real valuables for pieces of paper !!" " Trust me, Great Khan, this is going to work wonders for the rulers."

Post moderne man has gone one step beyond: they don't even get a piece of paper which could function as toilet paper in a pinch. Now it is all ones and zeroes in some ambiguous hidden spot called the cloud.

Wolf von Witting should hop over to Red Sash Games; Ian Weir has some interesting products for that era of history and the historical commentaries contain some priceless material that you'd have to really dig through libraries to get. I'm a Freddy the Great fan because of Carlyle’s work and Red Sash Lace Wars series fills in a lot of the era squabbles and personalities.

I bought some kits recently. One is an Elenco strandbeest which is supposed to walk around under windpower like the original artwork does. Another welcome surprise was Revell kit 85-5264, 1/48th scale PT-17 (also known as a Navy N2S- 3). It is a wonderful example of modern art in modelling, an incredible level of detail and a reasonable price. Since I spent a lot of my preschool youth climbing around in one of these I appreciate the attention to details involved.

Dave Haren

{Thank you for a very interesting letter, Dave. I have not read Aurora yet, but plan to do so Real Soon Now (as in, between semesters), and all the reviews I have read indicate that it is a challenging novel. There is no question that space exploration, let alone expanding the human race to other solar systems, is beyond dangerous; the recent success of Andy Weir’s The Martian (both book and movie versions) proves that nothing can be taken for granted when exploring space, not even in near Earth orbit. It seems to me the bottom line that the human race needs to answer is the hardest question of all: how can we help ourselves survive? Adaptability is the key, and humans have proven over and over that we are a highly adaptable species. Then again, so are cockroaches.} 27

Herewith, a listing of conventions related to the science fiction and fantasy fields that are in the Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Louisiana, and Arkansas region. It has been edited down from a much longer listing I use; Google in the phrase “What’s Happening” or “Texas Re- gional Science Fiction Conventions” if you want to look for the anime, furry, gaming, and comics oriented get togethers nearest to you. Go to this site and browse to your heart’s content. In the meantime, here’s the listing from December 2015 up to the end of August 2016.

ConDFW XV A Science Fiction & Fantasy Literary Event February 12-14, 2016 Hilton Dallas Lincoln Centre 5410 LBJ Freeway Dallas, TX 75240-6276 DFW Metroplex area Author GOH: John Scalzi Author GOH: Seanan McGuire Science fiction and fantasy convention featuring writing/publishing based programming, science programming, an excellent collection of guests, art show, rooms of board gaming, a charity book swap and auction, a short story contest, a costume contest, and a slew of non-traditional activities such as the Sci-Fi Spelling Bee. We welcome one and all to show up, hang out, meet old friends, make new ones, and have an excellent time! The Normal Features: Art Show, Autographs, Dealer's Room, Con Suite, Panel Discussions, Gaming, Gallery Tables, Freebie Ta- bles And the Abnormalities: Charity Book Swap, Hard Science Panels, Intergalactic Archaeology, "Late Night Double Feature", Artist Drawing Challenge, Sci-Fi Spelling Bee, Short Story Contest, Spontaneous Sing-Alongs. Be there or be Rhomboicosahedral! Brought to you by the Texas Speculative Fiction Association, a 501 (c) (3) organization. 100% volunteer-run.

This fanzine supports New Orleans in 2018

OwlCon Gaming, Fantasy, & Science Fiction Convention February 19-21, 2016 RMC/Ley Student Center Rice University Houston, TX OwlCon is an annual gaming convention at Rice University, Houston, TX, dating back to 1980. We feature table top and live action role playing games, miniatures games and events, historical miniatures, board games,

All-Con 2016 Multi-format convention featuring autographs, gaming, comics, & a burlesque show. March 17-20, 2016 Westin Dallas Park Central 12720 Merit Drive Dallas, Texas 75251 (DFW Metroplex area) For three days All-Con provides an umbrella of content supporting fans of Science Fiction, Fantasy, Renais- sance, Anime, Costuming, Theater / Performing Arts, Mystery, Art, Crafts, Collecting, and Film Making. To help 'give back' there are several charity events at the convention every year. All-Con is fan organized and built on community participation. We offer a track dedicated entirely to cross promoting clubs, conventions, and events. The best part is you may cross promote as a panelist for FREE as

AggieCon 47 Multi-genre entertainment and comic convention. April 1-3, 2016 Brazos County Expo Center Bryan, Texas ...[D]emos, lectures, workshops, panel discussions, games, and media showings. Dealers Room, Art Show, Gaming, Cosplay, Video Room, Charity, etc. See also AggieCon Facebook page Brought to you by Cepheid Variable

CyPhaCon Southwest Louisiana’s premier Anime, Gaming and Scifi convention April 8-10, 2016 Lake Charles Civic Center 900 Lakeshore Drive Lake Charles, LA 70601 SpringHill Suites by Marriott Lake Charles, Louisiana Anime Industry Panels, Anime Screenings, Artist Alley, Board Games, Charity Auction, Cosplay Events With Prizes, Dealer Room, General Cosplay All Over, Guest Panels, Live Action Role Playing, Role Play- ing Games, Video Gaming, Workshops.

WhoFest 3 A fan celebration of everybody's favorite Timelord. April 22-24, 2016 Westin Dallas Fort Worth Airport 4545 West John Carpenter Freeway Irving, TX 75063 Dallas/Fort Worth MetroPlex WhoFest is a production of the Dallas Future Society, a non-profit 501(c)(3) corporation dedicated to the ad- vancement of science, literature, and music for the future of all mankind. This material is published by the Dal- las Future Society in furtherance of its literary and educational purposes. The opinions expressed are those of

South Texas Comic Con April 29-May 1, 2016 McAllen Convention Center McAllen, Texas area Comics, celebrities, art, collectables, cosplay contests. Plus literacy initiative in conjunction with McAllen Public Library fighting illiteracy in South Texas. Sponsored by Ka-Boom Comics & Collectibles.

Corrupted Cog Steampunk (Presumably May 2016) Austin, Texas area "[A]n exciting Steampunk Event in Downtown Austin, Texas – just off Historic East 6th Street" Sponsored by Westernpunk Productions.

Space City Comic Con Space City Comic Con is the Gulf Coast's fan-culture convention and family entertainment, pop-culture expo for all ages. For fans of comics, sci-fi, fantasy, gaming, literature and art. May 27-29, 2016 NRG Center [formerly AstroArena, next to old AstroDome] 8309 Fannin Street Houston, TX 77054 Greater Houston, TX area A number of actors, artists, cosplayers, and industry guests.

FanExpo Dallas Comics, Sci Fi, Horror, Anime, Gaming. June 3-5, 2016 (downtown Dallas, TX) Comics, Celebrity Guests, Artist Alley, Panel discussions, Cosplay/Masquerade, Movies, Comics, Toys, Video Gaming, Games, TV, Horror, Original Art, Collectibles, Anime, Manga & More! Over 60,000 fans in over 600,000 square feet. Presented by Dallas Comic Con. 30

A-Kon 27 The Southwest's Largest Anime Convention Anime, comics, cosplay, media, & gaming convention June 3-5, 2016 Hilton Anatole Dallas 2201 N Stemmons Fwy Dallas, TX 75207 (DFW Metroplex area/ downtown Dallas) Dealers Room, Guests, Seminars & Workshops, Multiple Video Rooms, Gaming & Tournaments, Premier Film Showings, Art Show & Auction, Autographs, Banquet, Costume Contest, Goodie Bags&Freebies, and Musical Concert A-Kon is the oldest continually running, anime-based convention in N. America.

Comic Palooza: The Texas International Comic Con Comics & gaming con June 17-19, 2016 George R. Brown Convention Center 1001 Avenida de las Americas Houston, TX 77010 Two host hotels: Hilton Americas–Houston 1600 Lamar Houston, Texas 77010 Hyatt Regency Houston 1200 Louisiana Street Houston, TX 77002 (downtown Houston, TX) Comicpalooza's mission is to provide the best and biggest annual multi-format pop culture convention in the southwest region of the United States, serving not only the fans of comics, science fiction, fantasy, video and table top gaming, anime, music and film, but also as a trade show and showcase for the studios, publishers, and manufacturers in those industries. Largest comic con in Texas. Live Art Event, Comicpalooza Film Festival, industry panel discussions, roller derby games, quidditch matches, live music, dancers, circus performers, and much more. Comicpalooza is also one of the largest art events in Houston, featuring scores of artists as well as numerous writers, celebrities, and performers, and much, much more!

ApolloCon 2016 Houston's Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror Conference (Presumably June 2016) Houston, TX area Panels, Art Show & Auction, Authors, Artists, Scientists, ApolloKids, Concerts, Demos, Masquerade and Costume Awards, Dance, Dealers Room, Gaming (including LARP), Media Room, Networking, Room Par- ties. Writer's Workshop. See also our Facebook page! Sponsored by the Houston Science Fiction Association, a 501(c)(3) organization.

Bayou Con Anime, comics, sci-fi (Presumably June 2016) Greater Lake Charles, LA area "Celebration of all things fandom that takes place each June in Southwest Louisiana. The convention combines the very best in anime, sci-fi, comics, and gaming jampacked in a fan produced event." Includes media guests & cosplay! BayouCon is a non profit organization operating under the legal name of the "Southwest Louisiana Science Education Foundation, Inc.". We are committed to providing a great fan produced convention for the folks of

Texicon: Where the West Begins Table-Top Gaming is Educational. Gaming con. June 23-26, 2016 Hurst Conference Center 1601 Campus Drive Hurst, TX 76054 Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex area Texicon supports all three sections of gaming: Miniatures, Role-Playing, and Board gaming. Each year Texi- con will focus on a specific section. Texicon also hosts seminars that focus on every aspect of gaming. In these seminars, experts will speak about various aspects of games and gaming. Some speakers will be seasoned gamers, others will be industry special- ists. We hope you will be brave enough to try a new game. See also Texicon Facebook page. 32

SoonerCon 25: The Silver Age Oklahoma's own ComicCon/Pop Culture Expo Science Fiction, Fantasy, Gaming Con June 24-26, 2016 Reed Conference Center 5800 Will Rogers Rd Oklahoma City, OK 73110 Sheraton Hotel Oklahoma City, OK area Literary GOH: David Weber Artist GOH: Nene Thomas Toastmaster: Selena Rosen Master of Ceremonies: Peter Pixie Writers Workshop Clinician: Toni Weisskopf This incarnation of SoonerCon is deliberately designed to celebrate all aspects of fandom. We don’t intend to have a solely "books" or "TV" or "art" emphasis. The emphasis is on FUN. Events include: Film Festival, Art Show, Gaming, Cosplay and Masquerade. Charity. Panel and Workshops. Video Rooms. We are very happy to announce the creation of the Oklahoma Speculative Fiction Hall of Fame. Beginning in 2013, SoonerCon will induct members into the Hall of Fame, and present them with the newly created "Nucleon Award". Members of the Hall of Fame will be Oklahomans (and those originally from Okla- homa) who have contributed significantly to the development of pop culture and speculative fiction in both Oklahoma and the world.

Several Unlimited Summer Party Club event (Presumably July 2016) Greater Houston, TX area Come together with fellow fans! RSVPs preferred. And tell your friends!

Texas ComiCon 2016

Comics & gaming July 8-10, 2016 San Antonio Shrine Auditorium 901 North Loop 1604 W. San Antonio, TX 78258

San Antonio, TX area Celebrities, Dealers, Artist Alley, Gaming, Kids' Costume Contest, etc.

ArmadilloCon 38 Literary science fiction con. July 29-31, 2016 Omni South Park Hotel 4140 Governor's Row Austin, TX 78744 Austin, TX area Panels, Art Show, Gaming, Charity, Full Day Writer's Workshop, Dealer's Room, and more! ArmadilloCon is a literary science fiction convention held annually in Austin, with several hundred attendees. We are a place where the smartest people in the world gather to celebrate their uniqueness and intelligence. Oh, and we talk about books too. The primary focus of ArmadilloCon is literary science fiction, but that's not all we do -- we also pay attention to art, animation, science, media, and gaming. Every year, dozens of professional writers, artists and editors attend the convention. We invite you to attend the convention especially if you are a fan of reading, writing, meeting, sighting, feeding, knighting, and all the other things folks do at a sci-f/fantasy convention. Sponsored by the Fandom Association of Central Texas, a 501(c)(3)nonprofit organization

Glitch Con "A fandom oriented convention focusing on Sci-Fi, Fantasy, Gaming, and Anime." (Presumably August 2016) Springdale, Arkansas area Our goal is to bring the very best of what these cultures have to offer to Northwest Arkansas to bring the local fandom communities together and provide the very best in entertainment for our attendees while raising money for our charity of choice.

MidAmeriCon II, the 74rd World Con August 17-21, 2016 Kansas City Convention Center and Bartle Hall 301 West 13th Street, Suite 100 Kansas City, MO 64105 Kansas City, MO GOH: Kinuko Y. Craft GOH: Patrick & Teresa Nielsen Hayden GOH: Tamora Pierce GOH: Michael Swanwick Toastmaster: Pat Cadigan Five days of programming on hundreds of topics from books to media, from art to costuming, from movies to television to anime, from science fiction to science fact, as well as an art show, masquerades, the Hugo Awards ceremony, dealer's rooms, and much more!

I hope to see many of you at some of these conventions and events during 2016. Currently on our attendance docket are possibly ConDFW in February, maybe AggieCon in March, most likely ApolloCon in June, and definitely MidAmeriCon II in August. Fall conventions are still under discussion, but if Weird West Fest returns and Airship November materializes, add those in.

Delta H Con 54 Hours of anime and gaming. Gamer and Anime Convention in the South. August 19-21, 2016 Hotel Marriott Westchase 2900 Briarpark Houston TX 77045 Houston, Texas area Dealers Room, Artist's Alley, Art Auction, Art Show, Anime&DVD Screening Room, Anime Music Video (AMV) Contest (Rules), CosPlay [Graciously put on by Anime No Kai of UH], Manga Reading Room, Live Action Role Playing events (LARP's), Speaker Panels, Workshops, Bubble Room (Kid geared area), Collect- able Card Games, PC Game Room, Role Playing events (RPG's), Terrain or Miniture Games (Mini's), & Board Games.

CTC GeekFest 2015 August 19-21, 2016 Mayborn Planetarium & Space Theater Killeen, TX 76540 Geekfest activities for kids and adults will include video game tournaments, contests, movie screenings, inter- active video game demonstrations, presentations and entertainment by local groups and companies, vendor booths and a silent auction. Yes, the Humans vs Zombies competition is back along with two showings of The Rocky Horror Picture Show!

Bubonicon 48 Science Fiction & Fantasy Convention August 26-28, 2016 Albuquerque, New Mexico area Special Guests: Rachel Caine, David Gerrold, Joe R. Lansdale & Lee Moyer Panels, Art Show, Dealers Room, Gaming, Auctions, Film Screenings, Readings, Autographs, Filking, Sci- ence Talk, Costume Contest, Green Slime Awards, Fan Programming, and more! Presented by the NMSF Conference in association with various kind folks of the Albuquerque SF clubs. Bubonicon 47 will benefit at least the Williamson Library Collection at Eastern NM University, the Roadrun- ner Food Bank, and the Albuquerque Public Library Foundation.

Why did the Buddhist Monk decline Novocain when undergoing multiple root canal procedures?

He wanted to transcend dental medication.

I also heard from

Leybl Botwinik, Claire Brialey, Arnie Katz, Guy H. Lillian III, Tom Sadler, David Thayer, Felicity Walker.

Thank you, one and all.

Coa’s

Felicity Walker: Apartment 601, Manhattan Tower, 6611 Cooney Road, Richmond, BC, Canada, V6Y 4C5

Book Discussion Box

It is the love of reading that drives many science fiction fans, so much so that the vast majority of fans do not limit themselves to merely genre fiction. In fact, a quick, informal survey of Facebook postings by sf fans reveals a wide variety of interests: fantasy and steampunk literature, of course, but some of the other topics are coin collecting, history, beer, mysteries, traveling, beer, space exploration, ancient aliens, old movies, beer, rock and roll, music therapy…and beer. I detect a pattern here.

One book I am currently reading in my office at Blinn College—I usually take a break from grading and lesson planning by grabbing something off my bookshelves—is Seven Gothic Tales (1934, Modern Library edition) by Isak Dinesen, the pen name of Baroness Karen von Blixen-Finecke, née Karen Christenze Dinesen (1885-1962). So far I have only read the novella “The Deluge at Norderney”, a very moody, brooding story of Cardinal Hamilcar von Schestedt following a massive North Sea storm that swamps the island of Norderney, the Cardinal’s efforts to rescue the island’s inhabitants, and other results of the storm. An intriguing tale that makes me wonder what the others are going to be like.

Frankly, my dear, I really don’t know.

No. I take that back. Actually I have somewhat of an idea. Here goes:

For about two years now this fanzine has assumed a publication schedule of “whenever I can find the time to get it done.” To be honest, that is probably what a lot of us do; that is how a lot of us pub our ishes, and yes, it makes per- fectly good sense. Yet other fan editors are much more diligent, maintaining rigid weekly schedules (like MT Void put out every Friday by Evelyn and Mark Leeper) or monthly (such as Taral Wayne’s Broken Toys), bimonthly (Tom Sad- ler’s The Reluctant Famulus), or quarterly (such as Banana Wings by the Fishlifters). There do exist fanzines, produced online, that are updated daily, such as File:770, but Mike Glyer is retired, so he has nothing better to do with his time (he said with a grin). What I would like to do is get Askance back on a regular quarterly schedule again, with issues produced in the months of March, June, September, and December of each year.

See, I’m planning ahead, doing a bit of time-binding as I project where this fanzine is heading as it plunges ahead because, as you know, time keeps on slipping into the future. I know this is true because Steve Miller said so. Last weekend (well, over Thanksgiv- ing weekend, to be precise) it struck me that in March of 2017—or roughly 15 months from now—Askance will be celebrating it’s tenth year of publication. Therefore, the 40th issue will be that lucky an- nish, provided I can maintain a quarterly pace. I am sure I can. The bottom line is that at some point next year I should start planning/ acquiring material/nagging contributors/et al for that celebratory issue.

Hmph. That rather shocks me. And here I thought just being in fandom for over forty years was an achievement. I guess time really does fly when you’re having fun.

- John