KNOT A FANZINE #1

December 2020 Produced by Marc Ortlieb P.O. Box 215, Forest Hill, Vic 3131 Australia who doesn’t do that sort of thing anymore. [email protected]

NOTES FROM THE SPECTACLE CASE

A number of years ago I decided that I wasn’t going to produce fanzines any more. The cost of postage was ridiculously high and I’d pretty much severed my connections with fandom, with the exception of the occasional poker game with Julian Warner, Seth Lockwood, Carey Handfield, Cindy Clarkson and Justin Ackroyd, none of whom produced fanzines any more either. I had limited contact with some fannish friends, via Facebook. I even dropped in on a couple of Melbourne conventions - albeit usually briefly. But I’d discovered an alternate “fandom” - Scouting - which managed to expand to the point that I was looking after a District of Cub Scouts, was looking after a Box Hill Scout Group, was assisting on courses training Cub Scout Leaders, was on the committee for a major annual camp for Scout Leaders and was attending Cub Scout camps at Pack, District and State level. I also managed to fit in working full time as a Science Teacher. Anyway, things changed. In October 2018, ANZAPA (The Australia New Zealand Amateur Press Association) celebrated its 50th anniversary and, given that I’d first joined in 1975, I figured that I should contribute to the mailing. I’d retired from teaching and, though my involvement in Scouting hadn’t decreased (and still hasn’t) I found that I had time on my hands. My ANZAPAzines started to increase in size and I found myself writing articles for ANZAPA that, in the past, I would have used in my genzines. I still had no particular interest in producing a genuine, but that old devil egoboo raised its ugly head. Why, I thought, should I confine myself to torturing only the members of ANZAPA with my deathless prose when I could be inflicting it on a wider audience? Granted the idea of actually printing and distributing a paper fanzine was still not particularly attractive but the Internet was offering an easier way of distributing fanzines, and I already had the articles in digital form. I’d even thought of a catchy title for a fanzine containing all of my ANZAPA contributions, naturally stripped of the Mailing Comments which were specifically aimed at ANZAPA members. I would call it Compendium. I then procrastinated, having picked up an additional Scout Group to manage and having discovered that leading two Groups was taking up lots of my time with liaising with the local Council and dealing with personnel issues and ensuring that the Scout Halls were maintained in reasonable nick. Then come 2020…we’ve had bushfires and COVID-19 and so what better way could there be to round ff that sort of disastrous year than by putting together my ANZAPA compendium? Given that I’d adopted a knot motive in naming my ANZAPAzines, the title chose itself. So welcome to the first issue of Knot A Fanzine. My current aim is to produce an issue every year - a target that should be achievable given that I already have the material for #2 waiting to be assembled. (I won’t put it out until after the December ANZAPA - now in pdf format - goes out later the month.) The fanzine reflects an assortment of interests while still making occasional mention of science fiction. I felt that I needed to tie it intro the ostensible reason that most of us became fans - science fiction - and so, to ensure that I maintained some sort of attachment, I went to my bookshelf, where I have a load of issues of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction - in some sort of chronological order. Thus you will find issues of F&SF from 1969 onward reviewed in these pages. The zines also reflect my interest in the history of Australian fandom, though not with the sort of historical scholarship displayed by ANZAPA founder Dr Leigh Edmonds. Other regular themes are the works of Lewis Carroll, evolutionary science, rock music and even Scouting and knotting. I don’t anticipate a letter column, given that this zine will only appear annually and while members of FAPA may be willing to wait a year to make comments on fanzines, given that this is the Internet Age, with Facebook comments being made and seen within minutes of publication I don’t think such responses are particularly apposite. Oh yes and, in the past, I offered my zines for the usual or for a naughty in the bushes. As an old fan and tired married I can’t really justify that either. As for the title of this editorial that has a venerable history, dating back to when I used to indulge in certain substances which I carried in an old spectacle case that fitted comfortably in the ancient army greatcoat. Both have been relegated to history, or the local rubbish dump.

1 Wye Knott #1

Produced for ANZAPA by Marc Ortlieb P.O. Box 215 Forest Hill Vic 3131 Australia.

The Revised Australian Apas List

This is based on a list originally created for ANZAPACon Two and modified, both there and subsequently at ARCon. Australian apas have a fifty year history, dating back to Leigh Edmonds founding of APA-A in 1968. APA-A became ANZAPA with its third mailing, and, as ANZAPA, is still running. Although there were other apas between 1968 and Aussiecon in 1975, the influx of fans in 1975 led to a boom in Australian fanzine production, and, coincident with this, the founding of several apas, which flourished in the late 70s and early eighties, but which had died by the time of Aussiecon Two in 1985. Some Australian apas seem to have spun off overseas apas, Morningstar taking its inspiration from Alarums and Excursions, the U.S. role playing apa and the Furry Animals APA being descended from Rowbrazzle. In addition, there are the media apas, like Centro and Strange Matter, which seem modeled more on the A&E1 model than the FAPA2 model that ANZAPA, APES and APPLESAUCE followed. There have also been special purpose apas, such as QVC and the Grong Grong Gazette the purpose of which has been taken over by the Internet in one form or another. My suspicion is that none of these apas, apart from ANZAPA, still exist but I could well be wrong. I’d be fascinated to discover that there are other apas that have come and gone since I first compiled this list.

AUSTRALIAN AMATEUR PRESS ASSOCIATIONS A working list

1975 Aussiecon Apa An apa for committee members and other workers ANZAPA still running (See APA-A below). APA '83. Apa for the Australia in '83 Worldcon Bid Committee APA Nova Circa 1970. An apa associated with the Nova Mob. APA-A started in October 1968 by Leigh Edmonds By mailing three it had been named ANZAPA Apes. Adelaide apa which started with a crude, rude & vulgar orientation Alan Bray was the first O.E. 1976 Applesauce Sydney based apa Originally edited by Ken Ozanne, with later stints from Jack Herman and Peter Toluzzi. Terry Frost was OE when it died in 1984 Centero Media orientated apa edited by Nicki White from Canberra Conglomeration. WOOFlike apa connected to media Natcons edited by James Allen Furry Animals APA edited by Craig Hilton & Paul Kidd Hocus Pocus Invitational apa run by Joy Window Morningstar A Gaming Apa, along the lines of Alarums & Excursions. Ca 1979 Edited by Phillip MacGregor from Sydney QVC (Quatre Vingt Cinq) Apa for the Aussiecon Two Committee SAPS Sydney regional apa for the SSFF ca 1974 Saturday Morning Age Weekly apa centred on the Magic Puddin Club 1976 Scapa Flow SCA apa edited by Peter Ryan ca 1989 Silly Point Cricketing apa edited by John Foyster Two mailings produced. 1989 Strange Matter Sian O'Neale. Dr Who & media apa. The Grong Grong Gazette Apa/Newsletter connected to the 1975 LeGuin Workshop, edited by Randal Flynn The Phantom Zine. A W.A. apa with comics orientation but with general apa stuff too. Larry Dunning O.E. 1981 ZAPA A Melbourne regional apa, founded by Steve Palmer and briefly edited by Derrick Ashby

1 Alarums & Excursions. American Role Playing apa which is still going under Lee Gold its founder.

2 Fantasy Amateur Press Association. The first of the sf based apas. From the U.S.. Still going but very much smaller than it used to be. 2

NOTES FROM THE SPECTACLE CASE

So, I’ve completed my first year of complete retirement. Do I miss school? Not in the least. As so many of my fellow retirees have noted, it’s hard to work out how I managed to do things and still work at the same time. One of the things I did think of doing with my retirement was becoming more involved in fandom again but I intend to make this a very limited return from the Glades of Gafia. It will, I suspect, involve the occasional ANZAPA contribution and some work helping Carey and Justin to administer the BG*FF (Bloody Good Fan Fund) which will be raising money to get Bruce Gillespie to the New Zealand Worldcon in 2020. Otherwise my weeks will follow their current slothful pattern:

Monday – Scout Heritage Centre, either Mackie Rd or Elm Street. Sorting donated badges & scarves, cataloging Scouting related newspaper articles and preparing our 2019 Centenary of the Wood Badge display. This also involves pleasant natter over morning tea and lunch and ensuring that everything is ready for any evening visits I’m assisting on for later in the week.

Tuesday-Friday – Dropping Natalie off at work, a leisurely breakfast, catching up on kitchen washing up or getting clothes out on the line. A brisk cycle to Forest Hill to collect the mail and minor shopping requirements, home for Facebook and for catching up on any Scouting administrivia I have to cover. Thursday night Cub Scouts at Blackburn South, other nights visiting other Cub Packs in my district, or meetings, or tour guiding at Heritage or slacking off at the computer.

Weekends – Saturday shopping followed by 6th Box Hill Group, or on camp or training courses or planning.

It’s a tough life, but someone has to do it.

Occasionally my Scouting links me back to my old fannish pursuits. Barb de la Hunty is currently the Chief Scouting Commissioner for Western Australia and so her name crops up in various Scouting connections. While at a 3 recent Leaders Course, I met a guy called Jeremy Dickson who was involved in media fandom and the MSFC and who knew Gunny. One of my patrol leaders from Gilwell Reunion is a friend of Derek Screen & Sharon. On last weekend’s Cub Camp, our Park Ranger, Fiona, was an SCA member who knows Cary Lenehan and Ann Poore. It’s all terribly incestuous.

And I guess it’s not really an apa contribution unless I contribute some gory health details and so I can mention my recent health scare. I’d been coughing and wheezing with one of those nasty Melbourne lurgi variants but, when I was woken by what seemed to me to be like asthma, I figured I’d better visit a doctor. The doctor insisted that I have an x-ray and, when she looked at it, she insisted that I go to Box Hill Hospital’s Emergency department, and so I did where they shaved patterns into my chest hair for an ECG and took blood and checked my very high bloods pressure. “What is you’re usual blood pressure Mr Ortlieb?” “I don’t know. I haven’t visited a doctor in years.”

Anyway, the upshot was that I was permitted to return to society on the condition that I make more appointments with a Doctor. So I now have a G.P. who tells me that my weight is too high – the word he used was obese - and that my diastolic blood pressure is still too high. So I’m taking more control of my eating – no more demolishing a packet of chocolate while sitting at the computer and a little more gently bike riding – my knees can cope with local rides. I’m also on blood pressure tablets and so can join the group of leaders who, at Scout camps, take out their morning medication.

As for ANZAPA – I seem to have fallen back into the habit for the moment. I’ll have to see if I can mention scifi every now and then and may even attempt – Shock Horror – WHAT KNOT?

Produced for ANZAPA by Marc Ortlieb P.O. Box 215 Forest Hill Vic 3131 Australia. “If your memory serves you well I was going to confiscate my lace And wrap it up in a sailor’s knot And hide it in your case.” Bob Dylan, via Brian Auger and the Trinity

NOTES FROM THE SPECTACLE CASE

Well, school holidays, almost. Cath has had her knuckle replaced and I’m faffing about doing all sorts of tiny tasks because I don’t seem to have enough interest to commit to any major task. Apart from acting as taxi driver this morning, I’ve been working on my desk – finding odd pieces of paper, receipts etc and filing them appropriately – either in the round file or in the stack of folders on the shelves. It’s been productive but not particularly riveting. Thursday week sees me flying to Adelaide for Mum’s birthday. I will admit to a little trepidation as, when I was last in Adelaide a year ago, I got punched in the face while waiting for a bus. I still haven’t worked out why that happened. My guesses to date have been (a) My assailant mistook me for a local kiddy-fiddler. (b) My assailant had overdosed on Christmas and mistook me with my fine white beard for his nemesis, Santa. (c) The quality of ice in Elizabeth was stronger than he’d allowed for. I’m going to be very careful on this trip. It’ll also be a strange visit in that I won’t have a “home base” in Elizabeth any more. My brother Jon has done an excellent job in arranging the sale of the family residence in Elizabeth Downs and so I’ll be staying at the Elizabeth Motor Inn for the week. It’s a special visit though – Mum’s 90th Birthday. Fortunately the Motor Inn is within walking distance of Mum’s nursing home and so I won’t be sitting at bus stops 4 waiting for some nutter to come up and smash me in the face. I’m also trimming my beard so that I don’t look quite so festive. My other recent activities have included preparing for Gilwell Reunion, an annual gathering of Victorian Scout Leaders who have achieved their Wood Badges, assorted Scouting administrivia, watching a little cricket, viewing too many YouTube clips and playing on Facebook. I suppose I’d better get back to reading some of that skiffy stuff so that I can pretend that this is a real fanzine. The trouble is that I’m so far out of the loop that I don’t know what is worth reading. I’m quite happy revisiting old friends like Heinlein, McCaffrey and Robinson but I don’t know who to read who will engage me the way that they did. I’m certainly not up to cutting edge literary speculative fiction. I completed one of those silly Facebook surveys on “Which of these difficult books have you read?” and scored six of the forty listed literary masterpieces. I didn’t count “Ulysses” “Finnegan’s Wake” or “Dahlgren” because I’ve never managed to finish any of them.

DISGUSTING

Various things have had me thinking about Cordwainer Smith recently. I don’t think there’d be many ANZAPA members who’d be unfamiliar with his work and the connection that, as Paul Linebarger, he had with Australia. At one point I was trying to match his stories to a rational time line, but I soon realized that that was never going to happen. The clue is in the nature of his stories, which are both parables and myths. The air of mystery is integral to the stories. Indeed, just looking at the pseudonym is evidence of that. As has been noted in the pages of ANZAPA, a cordwainer is a shoemaker thus we get from the name cordwainer’s myth, i.e. a lot of cobblers. Among my YouTubing, I’ve been watching a number of pieces on the history of the Bible and of the Gospels and there was one clip that, in examining the Bible, noted that even atheists tend to over simplify the Bible, not fully appreciating that some sections of the Bible were, in all probability, never intended to be taken as literal truth, but were intended to illustrate moral issues or to examine ideas in a way that ordinary people could get the message through a parable. This is not news to many Christians, though it’s gone right over the heads of those poor souls who insist that the Bible, being the word of God must be literally 100% true and, that being the case, insist that there really were people called Adam and Eve and that Noah’s Flood was a real historical event. Well, I thought, if the authors of the Bible could do this, why couldn’t Paul Linebarger. Some of the Instrumentality stories can, then, be considered canonical. There’s no doubting that “The Dead Lady of Clown Town”, Norstrilia and “The Ballad of Lost C’mell” fit into a clear timeline, while the retelling of the story of the discovery of subspace travel being told in two different formats, as “Drunkboat” and as “The Colonel Came Back From the Nothing At All”, set in different times, one being about planoforming and the other about the discovery of Space3 mark them as myths. But the one that has marked itself as being a parable is “From Gustible’s Planet”. Most of the characters in Cordwainer Smith’s universe are either humans, modified humans, or his animal derived underpeople. Even the mythical Daimoni are human derived. There are suggestions of non-human intelligences, such as the dragons in “The Game of Rat and Dragon” but, in general, alien species do not feature in his stories. The Apicians in “From Gustible’s Planet” are a clear exception and their duck-like nature makes them more creatures of fable than genuine inhabitants of the Instrumentality’s universe. The story itself is a basic first contact story. The Apicians are discovered by a human explorer, Angary J. Gustible, who inadvertently passes to them the knowledge of space travel and allows them to “discover” Earth. Their initial visit to Earth leads them to discover all the wonderful foods that humans produce and they distinguish themselves by their capacity to reduce meals to remnants in very short order. There follows a Mexican stand-off as the Apicians demonstrate their strength in weaponry and in their ability to telepathically control humans. The stand-off is only resolved through an accident during a feast managed for the Apicians, where an accidental fire roasts the chief Apician and humans discover that, for all their abilities, Apicians are irresistibly delicious. The surviving aliens retreat to their home planet, cutting the space lanes to avoid any further contact with humans. That the story is a parable is also indicated through the names of the characters, Gustible, Arthur Djohn (keen as mustard?) – a Lord of the Instrumentality, and lady Ch’ao (Cow?). even the alien has the name Schmeckst, derived from the German word for “to taste”. Cordwainer Smith is generally more subtle in his naming (if you ignore D’Joan in “The Dead Lady of Clown Town”.) But what can we draw from the parable? On one level, it is as simple as “What’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.” The Apician gluttony is turned upon themselves. The parable also indicates that uncontrollable human appetites can have their upsides. And it’s an entertaining story, just not one that fits neatly into the general mood of Smith’s other Instrumentality tales. But then that’s part of the attraction of Cordwainer Smith. He created a rich set of loosely connected stories much as the ancient Semitic and Greek scribes created a similar canon in the Bible. Humans love a good story cycle and can draw much from such stories. 5 —oOo--- OUCH! MY INDEX FINGER My poor little typing finger has been getting a real workout recently. For reasons that escape me, I’ve decided that I really should update my ANZAPA index, which, the last time I looked, stopped in 2012 with mailing 270. I have to admit that it’s been interesting so far even though I still have 20 or so mailings, plus a few bits and pieces of mailings to go. (Cath assures me that she knows where he missing sections of those mailings are.) I’ll admit that I’ve been partly motivated by the knowledge that some people, including our esteemed OBE have made use of the previous incarnation of the index. Excel does make the task easier than it might have been, as does Bruce’s consistency in listing contributions in order of contributor’s surname. I suspect it would be more difficult had he followed my habit of listing zines in the order of when they arrived. I have noted the occasional glitch in the OBO listings, which I’ve corrected in the index, and I have, while going through the pile of mailings discovered accidental double copies of some contributions, but I’m assuming that the providing of x copies more than the required copy count has meant that no one ever missed out on particular contributions. I was amused to find Roman’s “Sparrowgrass and Battle-twigs” regularly listed as “Sparrowgrass and Battle-wigs”. Copy and paste, while invaluable, can lead to all sorts of interesting errprs. It’s also been interesting to see that there have been members come and go while I’ve been taking my break from ANZAPA. It’s also been fun scanning through the contributions and wondering what I might have commented on had I been active in ANZAPA at the time. Of course the question arises – what shall I do with the new version of the index. I’ve set it up so that I can append the new listings to the old spreadsheet, but how best to distribute it. I guess I could burn the required 26 CDs as I did for the previous index, but it would be far easier to distribute it via some aspect of the Internet. E-mailing it wouldn’t be a problem as the file is unlikely to weigh in at more than 2Mb. I’m not sure how many people use Dropbox, or I could create a private Facebook page – if everyone in ANZAPA was a Facebook user. Anyhow, it’s not an immediate issue. I should have the Index more or less ready by the February mailing and so I’ll get some feedback from you from that mailing and will arrange for the thing to be out in time for April. I’m still considering scanning all the covers too, to add to those I’d already digitized, but that file will be far too big to e-mail. It currently takes up 320Mb on disk. NORTH STAR It is nice to have time to just footle about on the Internet and, when I do, I get all sorts of pleasant surprises. One of these was discovering, via YouTube, that a band of which I was very fond – Curved Air – had done an album I’d never encountered and in 2014 at that! I’d occasionally seen lead singer Sonja Kristina’s name in the gig listings in the back of magazines like “Q” but I hadn’t realized that she’d reformed the band. For those of you who haven’t encountered Curved Air before, they belong to that genre usually described as prog rock. Their definitive line up consisted of: Sonja Kristina, lead vocals, she’d been in London performances of Hair; Darryl Way, violin – later to form a band Darryl Way’s Wolf and to contribute to Jethro Tull’s Heavy Horses album; Francis Monkman, guitar and synth – later to join John Williams, Kevin Peek and Herbie Flowers in Sky as well as doing session work for people like Kate Bush; Florian Pilkington-Miksa – drums and a rotating roster of bass guitarists. Later members of note included Eddie Jobson, later to play with Jethro Tull, Roxy Music and Frank Zappa and Stuart Copeland who went on to form The Police. I enjoyed their first two albums but was really hooked on Phantasmagoria, an album with sections lifted straight from Lewis Carroll’s poem but twisted around through Monkman’s feeding of the words through a synthesizer. Their track Vivaldi was reworked on a couple of their albums and even emerged on Sky’s Sky 2 album. I’d been picking out various old Curved Air performances from YouTube when I discovered the new album North Star for which Sonja Kristina had recruited a few old band mates. The line up was Sonja Kristina – vocals; Florian Pilkington-Miksa – drums; Kirby Gregory – guitar; Chris Harris – bass guitar and electric upright bass; Robert Norton – keyboards and Paul Sax – violin. Gregory had played in an earlier version of the band. Anyway, while killing time in Adelaide I figured I could run through the album, track by track: All tracks written by Harris/Kristina/Morgan/ Norton/Pilkington-Miksa/Sax unless otherwise noted "Stay Human" Nice guitar intro with a touch of keyboards. Sonja’s vocals still sound strong though drop away a little at the ends of lines. No appreciable violin but the guitar is good. "Time Games" Keyboards sound almost like something from a Frank Zappa album. This track wouldn’t have seemed out of place on Midnight Wire or Airborne. A little too mainstream and over-produced. "Puppets" (Darryl Way, Sonja Kristina) This one is a remake from the Second Album and here the advances in 6 recording technology work. The original version was rather thin but, on this version, the multi-tracking of Sonja’s voice in very effective. It’s still a trifle slow for my taste. Some nice piano. "Images and Signs" Sounds like an attempt to emulate some of Curved Air’s more interesting instrumentals from the Monkman period but hasn’t quite got the frenetic feel of something like “Propositions” or “Everdance”. The violin is too restrained. "Interplay" Too wordy. Sounds like a fairly simple poem set to music. The cliché ratio is high and the distorted guitar break doesn’t rescue the song. "Spider" Tasty instrumental. The violin & guitar work well together. The vibe sections are a little twee. "Magnetism" Evidence that Sonja needs to be kept away from the lyrics. Perhaps she listened to Joni Mitchell’s “Electricity” and thought that she could do something similar with magnetism and attraction. "Colder Than A Rose In Snow" (Paul Travis, Norma Tager) Remake of a Sonja Kristina solo track. The vocals are good, but slightly overwhelmed by the piano. The original version was mainly guitar based and allowed the vocals to be more to the fore. "Spirits in the Material World" (Gordon Sumner) Given that Stuart Copeland, one of Curved Air’s many ex- drummers, went on to form The Police, I guess it’s appropriate that Curved Air should cover one of their songs. Very much slower than the Police version and more atmospheric. Doesn’t really have the reggae feel of the original. "Old Town News" Very different vocal style. Kristina started off as a folk singer and this sounds more like electric folk, a la Jethro Tull, than it does prog rock. That said, there is a bit of Zappa-esque instrumental stuff here. “Situations" (Darryl Way, Rob Martin) First appeared on Air Conditioning. Much better production than on the original version. A fuller sounding version which, in this case is a plus but I prefer Monkman’s guitar on the original. "Chasing Cars" (Gary Lightbody, Nathan Connolly, Jonny Quinn, Tom Simpson, Paul Wilson) Cover of song by Snow Patrol. Not the best Snow Patrol to cover. I prefer their “Set The Fire To The Third Bar” but that may be because they had Martha Wainwright doing vocals on that. Having Sonja singing Martha’s part would have been interesting. This song is very slow and rather boring. "Young Mother" (Darryl Way, Sonja Kristina) First appeared on Second Album. This one is okay. The vocals are good and the instruments complement them. Again, not quite as raw as the original but, we I to chose a track to introduce Curved Air to a new listener, this one wouldn’t be bad. "Across the Universe" (John Lennon, Paul McCartney) A good cover. The song suits Sonja’s rather quavery vocals. Overall feeling - some very competent musicians and some pleasant songs but I’m not sure that the band can be considered prog rock any more. And, if nothing else, it’s got me going over their back catalog.

AFRAID KNOT?

Produced for ANZAPA by Marc Ortlieb P.O. Box 215 Forest Hill Vic 3131 Australia.

NOTES FROM THE SPECTACLE CASE

TRAVELS IN ELIZABETH

As noted in my previous ANZAPA contribution, I recently traveled to Elizabeth for Mum’s 90th birthday. I was nervous, given the punch in the face incident the previous year and so worked out an alternative - I’d buy myself a bike in Elizabeth. This wasn’t as profligate as you might think. Taxi fares in Adelaide are not cheap and the cost of a hire car was really excessive. I’d initially decided to walk around Elizabeth. The hotel room I had booked was within walking distance of Mum’s nursing home, just, and it seemed silly to pay for transport. However, the weather for Adelaide was looking on the uncomfortable side of hot. So I started researching and, as chance would have it, there was a Cash Converters shop right next to the Elizabeth Railway Station - which was my destination after flying into Adelaide. So, after arriving in Elizabeth, I walked round to Cash Converters and took a look at their stock of pre-loved bicycles. I saw some for $45, which didn’t look as though they’d survive the five minute ride to the hotel and a couple for $125 which looked more promising, so I went inside. When I explained what I wanted, one of the sales assistants showed me a couple that had just come in - one that she wanted $95 for. It had two strong selling points - wheels with thick new tires. These are very important in Elizabeth due to a nasty bicycle unfriendly plant that produces seeds we called three corner jacks, Emex australis. In ancient times people used such seeds as the inspiration for a metal device for deploying against horses. They were called caltrops and later found use against military vehicles with tires. The rest of the bike was not quite so brilliant. It had no front brake or front gear adjustment. The first wasn’t a major issue because, as a child, I was used to bicycles with back pedal brakes that only worked on the back wheel. The second was also only a minor inconvenience. Elizabeth is on the Adelaide Plains and is very flat and I had to intention of trying to ride the bike into the hills. The frame of the bike was good and, had I any intention of keeping the bike, it would have been worth adding the missing brakes and gear bits and pieces. 7 As it was I was more comfortable during my visit than I thought I’d be. Mum wasn’t up to long visits and these were better in the morning, as she tended to nap in the afternoons. She is thoroughly used to the nursing home routine and is living in a rather strange mixture of reality and fantasy. She kept asking me why her twin sister Esme didn’t visit and I didn’t correct her. Esme died a number of years ago in England and mum even had photos of her grave but I didn’t mention this. My brother Jon, who sees Mum more frequently than I do was amused when she described how, the previous morning she’d been gardening when a camel walked by. We had planned to have Jon, his partner Ali, my brother Chris and his partner Sue Schott and me together for Mum’s 90th, but Chris got diagnosed with shingles and so wasn’t permitted to visit the nursing home. For the rest of my time in Elizabeth I’d cycle over to the home in the morning and spend the afternoons in the cool of an air conditioned hotel room, watching cricket or reading. I got far further into James Joyce’s Ulysses than I’d thought possible and, to my surprise, found myself enjoying it. I also caught up with two school friends, Bob & Sean. I’ll be seeing them again in October when we have the 50th Anniversary of our Matriculation year. The bike also gave me the chance to find a nice hotel for dinner one night and it meant that I could cycle past my old home on Hamblynn Road where, by chance I met the new owner. My visit though didn’t leave me totally unscathed. On my last evening I’d decided to break my diet and get takeaway Kentucky Fried for dinner. I cycled round to the shop but made a mistake in turning in to the car park. I needed to brake, but forgot that I had no front brake. I wobbled to a halt, falling off the bike in the process and then proffered a shaky apology to the car driver I’d almost cut off. Apart from a slight graze to my leg the only thing really wounded was my dignity. The next morning, after visiting Mum, I cycled past the Salvation Army Op Shop and offered them as a donation the bicycle and the helmet, along with an unused box of tea bags. They seemed happy to accept them.

---oOo---

DIGGING INTO THE PAST – REVIEWS OF OLD F&SF Issues

While nattering to Bruce about old issues of F&SF Magazine, I figured that I could maintain the pretence that I’m still a science fiction fan by going back over my collection of old issues of F&SF and seeing what they were like and what sorts of material they presented.

Initially I’d hoped to start from my earliest issues – I know I have issues going back into the late 1950s – but they are inconveniently stored at present, and so I’ll start with those that are clearly shelved. I figure that, dealing with one per mailing, I’ll have enough to keep me going for well into the 2030s…

THE MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION June 1969 Cover price 50c Editor Edward L. Ferman

Contents:

Novel: Operation Changeling (2nd of 2 parts) Poul Anderson Short Stories: “Sundance”, Robert Silverberg; “Pull Devil, Pull Baker!”, Michael Harrison; “A Short Happy Life”, Joanna Russ; “A Run of Deuces”, Jack Wodhams; “Repeat Business” Jon Lucas. Article: “The Landlocked Indian Ocean” L. Sprague de Camp; “The Fateful Lightning” Isaac Asimov Cartoon: Gahan Wilson. Cover: Grey Morrow for Operation Changeling. Advert for StLouisCon 27th WorldCon with GoH Jack Gaughan & Ted White as fGoH $4.00 attending

Just my luck, I start with an issue that has the second part of a serialised novel and I don’t have access to the May issue that contains Part 1. But let’s go.

8 Operation Changeling Part 2 is a fantasy, set in a universe where magic works, though with science trappings i.e. reference to the Multiverse and to degaussing iron in order to allow magic to work on it. The protagonist is a werewolf, married to a witch. He works in a magical version of a technology company. His daughter, usually protected by a cat familiar, has been stolen by a demon from the hell universe. He sets out to recover her, starting in a church dedicated to Saint John. This story presupposes a post-war society, but this war was fought against a Caliphate, not against Nazi Germany.

The story itself is a quest story where the protagonist, assisted by his wife, a cat and the ghosts of Nikolai Ivanovitch [sic] Lobachevsky and János Bolyai travel into hell to retrieve his daughter. It echoes Orpheus’ visit to the Underworld and Heinlein’s Glory Road. Hell, as well as being another dimension in the Multiverse is non-Euclidian based on hyperbolic geometry and so they need the mathematicians to find their way around. As in any good fantasy adventure, our heroes demolish all the nasty demons with minimal difficulty before coming face to face with the worst of them all – a mild looking character with a German accent, a toothbrush moustache and a plain brown uniform with “a red armband with the ancient and honorable sign of the fylfot.”

To defeat this character, our hero has to summon help from another dimension in the Multiverse and it’s here that Anderson pulls out the mother of dei ex machina in the form of unnamed Athena, Thor and Quetzalcoatl. This allows the party to escape with their daughter.

As Fantasy it’s rather cute, without much depth, but with all sorts of topical references that would appeal to the audience of the late 1960s. There are two clear allusions to Tom Lehrer’s song “Lobochevsky”, one line verbatim “Nikolai Ivanovitch Lobachevsky is his name” and one of the punch lines to the story “Although Bolyai led our expedition, Lobachevsky published first.” The parallels to American Science and its establishments are somewhat laboured but not too painful. The style of the story owes more to The Maltese Falcon than to Tolkien and the jokes are adequately cheesy, the protagonist leaps through a window in his werewolf form “The pain as the glass broke and slashed me was nothing to the pain when I hit the concrete beneath.” Not Anderson’s best story but a page turner.

“Sundance” by Robert Silverberg is a horse of a different colour. When a story is prefaced by the editor, warning the reader “It is probably something of a departure for Mr. Silverberg; we think you’ll agree that it is a successful and rewarding one.” you know you’re in for some interesting reading. In this story Silverberg shifts the narrative from first to second to third person in the space of a very short piece, some passages merely lasting a paragraph or two. The story is apparently one of a native American, Tom Two Ribbons, faced by issues associated with a technologically advanced group of humans dealing with a more primitive alien world and echoes the re-evaluation of the colonisation of the U.S.A.. Silverberg clearly researched native American traditions well before either the book or film versions of Dances with Wolves and incorporates these into Tom’s character. The aliens themselves are truly alien and reminded me of Cordwainer Smith’s “loudies” in “When the People Fell”.

In dealing with indigenous cultures, ecological issues and drugs, and in his experimentation with narrative, Silverberg has ticked all the boxes that make this clearly a story of its time. It’s a story with a message, both concerning our treatment of indigenous cultures and of the harm that carries through to those generations that seem to have been fully assimilated.

I suspect that this is one of Silverberg’s earlier effects to escape from more traditional science fiction and to cultivate a more literary style. It worked for me.

“Pull Devil, Pull Baker!” by Michael Harrison. Michael Harrison, according to the Internet Speculative Database was the pen name of English author Maurice Desmond Rohan who wrote The Bride of Frankenstein under the name Michael Egremont . (I’m assuming from its 1936 publication date that this was a novelisation of the James Whale film)

The story wouldn’t have seemed out of place in an issue of John Carnell’s “New Worlds”. It’s quintessentially English featuring a small town Jewish dentist, Dr Ezra Solomon, and an aristocratic army colonel, Colonel Tankerville- Browse. Both are perfectly decent people and the Colonel comes to Dr Solomon to have a tooth pulled. Tankerville experiences some pain, for which Solomon feels guilty and, apparently as a result, both have vivid dreams featuring their long gone ancestors and an incident during which the Colonel’s ancestor tortured Solomon’s by pulling out his teeth and then murdering him over money Solomon’s ancestor had buried to avoid Sir Fulke de Braose de Tankerville’s extortion. As a result of the dream, they seek out the secret second, larger, portion of the treasure, which Tankerville’s ancestor didn’t find.

The story contains an element of payback – the sins of the fathers and all that sort of thing but there doesn’t seem to be any sort of moral here, apart from the fact that both Solomon and Tankerville’s wish that they contribute to the Holy Land being kept out of the hands of the Arabs is, in a strange way, fulfilled.

It’s a pleasant and very low-key story – very English.

9 “A Short Happy Life”, Joanna Russ. This one is a two page vignette based on the story of the student who was, in a physic test, asked how he could use a barometer to calculate the height of a building. Russ takes this idea and builds on the different possibilities with some thoughts on people and on the nature of barometers.

“A Run of Deuces”, Jack Wodhams. From an Australian contributor this is one that Bert Chandler would have enjoyed. It’s a hard science story of a passenger star ship travelling to another planet and deals largely with the ways that passengers while away the time on the trip. Most of the activities involve sex or gambling and it is the gambling that provides most of the plot of the story. The title rather gives away the denouement.

“Repeat Business” Jon Lucas. Only two published stories listed on ISFDB, the other one in F&SF in 1970 to which I will, no doubt, get around. This one is a pleasant little trifle about a small-scale cruise boat operator who hosts a group of travel agents. When they don’t eat any of the food so beautifully prepared for them, he starts to have his suspicions. No spoilers but I suspect that any of you could take that as a starting point and build a good twist to the ending. A good first sale story.

“The Landlocked Indian Ocean” L. Sprague de Camp. This is an article on the historical understanding of the interconnection between the Mediterranean, the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea, mentioning the precursors to the Suez Canal. It contains de Camp’s usual interesting archaeological musings.

“The Fateful Lightning” Isaac Asimov. Here Asimov looks at how the invention of the lightning conductor helped to usher in the secular age, noting how church spires being the tallest buildings in a village were regularly hit by lightning until Benjamin Franklin’s lightning rods were installed. Asimov also notes the way that work by Franklin and others drew people away from a religious explanation of lightning. It also covers the use of anaesthetics in childbirth. The end of the article points to the dawn of new rationalism which has proved to be rather transient given current climate change scepticism.

PHANTASMAGORIA: On the 150th Anniversary of one of Lewis Carroll’s lesser known works.

Phantasmagoria is Lewis Carroll’s longest poem, weighing in at 140 verses with five lines per verse, as opposed to The Hunting of the Snark, which has one more verse but in which each verse consists only of four lines. All things considered, I prefer the Snark, but Phantasmagoria has its own charms.

The title comes from a popular 18th and 19th century form of theatre entertainment whereby ghostly apparitions are formed. Charles Dodson was very fond of theatre and of magic and so one can easily imagine him linking the two for his own poem. I suspect he also enjoyed the opportunity to put his own stamp on the taxonomy and hierarchy of ghosts, poking a little gentle fun at both the classification systems used by biologists and the hierarchical system of ranking angels promoted by the church.

Though not gaining the popularity of Alice in Wonderland among those people fond of mind altering substances, Phantasmagoria does, as I have noted in various fanzines, find a home with Frances Monkman of the bands Curved Air and Sky. Curved Air’s third album stole the title and some of the feeling of the poem, as Monkman played around with running Sonja Kristina’s voice through an EMS Synthi 100 synthesiser on the following verse which comes straight from Carroll’s poem:

“Oh, when I was a little Ghost, A merry time had we! Each seated on his favourite post, 10 We chumped and chawed the buttered toast They gave us for our tea.”

As illustrated above the poem is made up of quintains with an abaab rhyme scheme. Carroll plays with us by really forcing some of the rhymes. Much as Tom Lehrer would later torture us with cheating rhyming “And you might have thought it tragic/ Not to mention other adjec/tives to think of all the weeping they will do.” Carroll hits us with:

“I’ve tried it, and can only say I’m sure you couldn’t do it, e- ven if you practised night and day, Unless you have a turn that way, And natural ingenuity.

He also teases us into expecting a rhyme. In the following verse you’d rhyme “your” with “door”, “more” and “snore” but, in doing so, we fall into Carroll’s trap because he’s actually rhyming “Curtail your [yer]” with “failure”

“If after this he says no more, You’d best perhaps curtail your Exertions—go and shake the door, And then, if he begins to snore, You’ll know the thing’s a failure.

The rhymes can also give us a clearer idea of pronunciations in Victorian England. A limerick that has long bothered me – not, I hasten to add, attributable to Lewis Carroll – is:

There once was a lass from Madras Who had a remarkable ass Not rounded and pink As you probably think It was grey had long ears and ate grass.

To get this to rhyme, you have to pronounce “grass” in n American accent. Otherwise you have to pronounce “ass” as “arse”, which rather spoils the limerick. Carroll’s verse below suggests that “asses” should be pronounced “arses” or that “glasses” shouldn’t be pronounced “glarses”. It’s all rather confusing to one like me who still pronounces “graph” as “grarf”.

With that he struck the board a blow That shivered half the glasses. “Why couldn’t you have told me so Three quarters of an hour ago, You prince of all the asses?

Another rhyme shows how American English retained older English pronunciations. I’d heard the term “vittles”, often in Westerns, referring to food, and I’d seen written the term “victuals” referring to food. The rhyme in the verse below makes the connection easier to follow, though using the term in the singular.

“And certainly you’ve given me The best of wine and victual— Excuse my violence,” said he, “But accidents like this, you see, They put one out a little.”

Carroll is fairly consistent in his rhythm scheme. First lines are iambic tetrameters while most “b” lines are iambic trimeters . This gives the poem a jaunty pace contrasting the supposed gravity of the subject matter. (Can we blame Carroll for Casper the Friendly Ghost?)

The poem is divided into Cantos, unlike the Hunting of the Snark which is an agony in eight fits. These cantos are named in mock Olde English, perhaps in a wry reference to Spencer’s The Faerie Queene. In structure they more or less follow the standard steps in plot development Canto 1: The Trystyng - a planned meeting or assignation which acts as the introduction. Canto 2: Hys Fyve Rules – developing our understanding of the characters. Canto 3. Scarmoges - Obsolete form of skirmish hence the conflict in the plot. Canto 4. Hys Nouryture food an expository lump that does not really serve to advance the plot. Canto 5. Byckerment continuing to develop the conflict. Canto 6. Dyscomfyture the denoument. Canto 7. Sad Souvenaunce an epilogue. Thus the poem justifies itself as an epic.

11 But what of the content of the poem? Well it does seem to build on the Victorian fascination with ghosts and the afterlife. Charles Dickens had mined this vein in A Christmas Carol in 1843 and there are marked similarities between how Scrooge encounters with his three ghosts and how Mr Tibbets encounters his. Whereas Dickens’ ghosts are thoroughly serious, Carroll’s are more figures of fun. There’s no real suggestion that the ghosts in Phantasmagoria are the spirits of the departed, more that they are part of a whole realm of alternative beings.

The content of the poem allows Carroll free rein with his puns. Carroll had an attack of cognitive dissonance when it comes to puns. In the first place he opening states his disapproval of the process, both in The Hunting of the Snark: “It will sigh like a thing that is deeply distressed And always looks grave at a pun.” Given that Phantasmagoria deals with refugees from the grave, can we forgive mention of a ghost whose choice of lodgings is influenced by the quality of the fortified wine to be found therein – the Inn Spectre.

“Port-wine, he says, when rich and sound, Warms his old bones like nectar: And as the inns, where it is found, Are his especial hunting-ground, We call him the Inn-Spectre.” I bore it—bore it like a man— This agonizing witticism!

Carroll also provides a quotation, attributed to Dr Johnson

“He did it just for punning’s sake: ‘The man,’ says Johnson, ‘that would make A pun, would pick a pocket!’”

Are we then to assume that, along with his other conjuring tricks, the Reverend Charles Dodgson was an accomplished pick pocket? The prosecution’s case can be proved with the following:

“Union is strength, I’m bound to say; In fact, the thing’s as clear as day; But onions are a weakness.”

Carroll’s interest in the theatre and its effects manifests itself in several ways in the poem. There is a single word reference to the Brocken Spectre when the ghost is explaining the nature of the Inn Spectre:

“ He tried the Brocken business first, But caught a sort of chill.”

This phenomenon would have been of the type to catch Carroll’s eye. I’d never encountered it and so I typed it into Wikipedia, with the following result:

“The Brocken Spectre The "spectre" appears when the sun shines from behind the observer, who is looking down from a ridge or peak into mist or fog. The light projects their shadow through the mist, often in a triangular shape due to perspective. The apparent magnification of size of the shadow is an optical illusion that occurs when the observer judges his or her shadow on relatively nearby clouds to be at the same distance as faraway land objects seen through gaps in the clouds, or when there are no reference points by which to judge its size. The shadow also falls on water droplets of varying distances from the eye, confusing depth perception. The ghost can appear to move (sometimes suddenly) because of the movement of the cloud layer and variations in density within the cloud.

I can’t help but see a reflection of this in the final section from The Hunting of the Snark, where the Baker is last seen, having located the phantom for which they are searching

“They beheld him – their Baker – their hero unnamed – On top of a neighbouring crag,”

Carroll loved demonstrating optical illusions to his child friends and so I’m sure this would have gained his interest.

Further theatrical references are seem when the ghost talks of other ghosts haunting battlements, much as Hamlet’s father does.

“Shakespeare I think it is who treats Of Ghosts, in days of old, Who ‘gibbered in the Roman streets,’ 12 Dressed, if you recollect, in sheets— They must have found it cold.

And

“I’ve often sat and howled for hours, Drenched to the skin with driving showers, Upon a battlement.”

Carroll was never averse to tuckerisations, putting himself and others he knew into his works. In this poem, John Ruskin gets a mention:

“That narrow window, I expect, Serves but to let the dusk in—” “But please,” said I, “to recollect ’Twas fashioned by an architect Who pinned his faith on Ruskin!”

This could be a wry dig at Ruskin who was, it appears, just as enamored of young Alice Liddell as was Dodgson himself (and with equal lack of success with Dean & Mrs Liddell’s approval)

“Her [Alice Liddell’s] post-Wonderland career was as unfulfilled as Dodgson’s. She continued to inspire hopeless romance. John Ruskin had a dalliance with her that was interrupted by her parents. “3

Carroll was also a keen critic of poor architecture and created a wonderfully wry critique of the new bell tower in his monograph “The New Belfry of Christ Church Oxford”. Here he perpetrates one of his finest puns. Given the pedagogical purpose of Christ Church, he decides that the shape of the belfry is perfect, as the moment someone sets their eyes on it for the fist time, they are moved to utter “ Thou teachest.”

One would, of course, be surprised to find mathematics absent from anything that Carroll had a hand in, and there are no such surprises in Phantasmagoria. Rather than simply refer to his host as a brick (a solid dependable fellow) the Ghost has to embellish the comment with a mathematical reference, which manages to maintain the rhyme and rhythm scheme of the verse:

The hues of life are dull and gray, The sweets of life insipid, When thou, my charmer, art away— Old Brick, or rather, let me say, Old Parallelepiped!’

For those who have forgotten their geometry of solids, a brick is a rectangular cuboid, having six rectangular faces this being a specific case of parallelepiped, a polyhedron with six faces, each of which is a parallelogram which is a quadrilateral with two pairs of parallel sides, parallel being…but you get my drift.

Carroll also poses us a problem in arithmetic, after his protagonist has been struck on the nose by a bottle thrown by his Ghost, who appears to have some of the attributes of a poltergeist.

And I remember nothing more That I can clearly fix, Till I was sitting on the floor, Repeating “Two and five are four, But five and two are six.”

My mathematical skills are not quite up to dealing with theorems in which addition is not commutative, let along why neither equation seems to give a correct answer. If this travels in the direction of non-Euclidian geometry then I’m happy to hear the explanation, and while you are at it, there’s a little matter of explaining to me the proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem.

Carroll’s protagonist has equivalent difficulty in explaining his situation to the Ghost, which gives Carroll the opportunity to play around with another of his mathematical pursuits – logic puzzles:

But, keeping still the end in view To which I hoped to come, I strove to prove the matter true

3 “The Story of Alice review – the worrying, winding road to Wonderland” Robert McCrum “The Guardian” 22/3/2015

13 By putting everything I knew Into an axiom:

Commencing every single phrase With ‘therefore’ or ‘because,’ I blindly reeled, a hundred ways, About the syllogistic maze, Unconscious where I was.

Carroll reveals his personal insecurities in one pair of verses aimed at those most limited of writers, the Critics but I take no umbrage from the Ghost’s explanation of the fate suffered by those ghosts found where they shouldn’t be:

“The Fourth prohibits trespassing Where other Ghosts are quartered: And those convicted of the thing (Unless when pardoned by the King) Must instantly be slaughtered.

“That simply means ‘be cut up small’: Ghosts soon unite anew. The process scarcely hurts at all— Not more than when you ’re what you call ‘Cut up’ by a Review.

The comparison of being cut up by a review with being slaughtered is surely telling.

And so, rather than inflict a posthumous slaughter on the Reverend Dodgson, allow me to conclude that, while I don’t hold Phantasmagoria in the esteem that I reserve for the two Alice books and The Hunting of the Snark, it is a cute piece of Victorian whimsy that deserves to be better known than it is. It displays Carroll’s wit and erudition and is a playful excursion into the world of the supernatural. If you haven’t read it, try it.

NOTHING IS BUT WHAT IS KNOT. (With apologies to William Shakespeare and Roman Orszanski)

Produced for ANZAPA by Marc Ortlieb P.O. Box 215 Forest Hill Vic 3131 Australia. EVERYBODY LOVES STRING The Goodies said it: “String, string, string, string Everybody loves string Hold up your pants Put on your vest Every one agrees String is best.”

So, according to some physicists, everything is made of tiny vibrating strings with eleven, twenty six or ten dimensions rather than our customary four. Sub-atomic particles are defined by the vibrational state of these strings. Physicists took this idea so seriously that the four men responsible for one variety of string theory, David Gross, Jeffrey Harvey, Emil Martinec and Ryan Rohm became known as the Princeton String Quartet maintaining an element of whimsical physics pioneered by Murray Gell-Mann when he named hypothetical sub-hadronic particles quarks, based on James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake. Physicists, by the way, have a tendency to test a joke to destruction as they did by 14 assigning the alternative properties of top and bottom to quarks in order to be able to search for a singular bottom quark, which would have, in their terminology, “naked bottom”. The bottomium particle, aka the Upsilon meson, which has been detected at Fermilab is a “flavorless” meson, composed of a bottom quark and an anti-bottom quark. So it’s very close to a naked bottom, which would certainly be tasteless. But I digress. I was talking about strings wasn’t I? There is even a connection between string theory and science fiction fandom. One of my favourite ex-students is Sundance Bilson-Thompson who, for a time, was involved in the Adelaide University Science Fiction Association. He was also known to attend the occasional convention. Needless to say, I was delighted to see his name quoted, a number of years ago, in a New Scientist article comparing string theory with loop quantum gravity. He even tried to explain this to me once – a classic example of the student surpassing the teacher. I think I was happier nattering with him about the possibilities of the Loch Ness monster when he was in Year Eight. Vibrating string does, of course, provide wonderful sounds, even ignoring the possibility of it making up all of the particles in the universe. Could the Beatles have created “Across the Universe” without a little help from the vibrating strings of their guitars and pianos, to say nothing of their vibrating vocal cords. Joni Mitchell links strings to the heavens in her song “Amelia” when she describes the vapour trails from six jet planes: “It was the hexagram of the heavens It was the strings on my guitar” When you think of all of the songs that have been composed on six simple strings, using just the chords Am, C and D, it’s not hard to join the physicists in thinking that every particle in the universe could be created using a few strings. But then, just to complicate matters, a different group of astrophysicists decided that sub-microscopic strings weren’t enough and so they had to postulate galactic filaments. (Filaments sound so much more scientific than strings don’t they?) These bits of string are typically between 50 and 80 megaparsecs, span entire galactic super clusters and incorporate dark matter and galaxies. Not exactly the thin fragile stuff that would readily come to mind when thinking about string. The way it’s described makes it sound somewhat like the tubulin micro-tubules that compose the cytoskeleton of eukaryotic cells. But I suspecting I’m teetering on the edge of one of the classic science fiction plot- nots. Gosh folks, our universe is just a single cell within a much larger organism… Let’s not go there String also makes an appearance, as a figure of speech, in one of my favourite series of sf novels, the Hultzein series by F.M. Busby. On the rebel planet, Number One, a favourite sport is kite fighting and, much as cricket terms such as sticky wicket have infiltrated the English language, terms such as “Keep your string loose” have entered the lingo of the colonists. Not that string has escaped our set of idioms. We have “more that one string to his bow”, “highly strung” and the affectionate “Stringbag” used to describe the WWII biplane The Fairey Swordfish. We can “string people along”; we ask “How long is a piece of string?” We can even, as the Goodies suggest, string up our trousers (as opposed to stringing up a rustler, which takes on a far more sinister tone.) I believe Johnny Cash made reference to this use of string in one of his songs: “Oh I keep my arms wide open all the time And I keep my pants up with a piece of twine Because you’re mine Please pull the twine.” Or something along those lines anyway. One skill that I have had to develop as a Scout Leader makes more prosaic use of string. It’s called “whipping”. Now, before you get all excited and start thinking about that book Scouts in Bondage, allow me to clarify. Gordon Perry’s Knots: A Practical Step-by-Step Guide to Tying Over 100 Knots (Quantum Books 2012) lists four types of whipping, all of which are intended to prevent the ends of ropes from becoming frayed knots, as alluded to in my previous ANZAPAzine. (Is it a coincidence that a manual involving string is put out by Quantum Books? I think knot.) So there is Common Whipping, French Whipping, West Country Whipping and Sail Maker’s Whipping. All of these are alternatives to back-splicing ropes, which also prevent the end of the rope from fraying. I once accused Captain Bert Chandler of using rough seaman’s language in his letter to The Mad Dan Review. He responded by showing me how rough seaman’s language can be by describing the cunt splice – a way of creating a loop in the middle of a piece of three stranded rope. Wikipedia notes the following: cut splice (originally called cunt splice) Perry’s book avoids this splice altogether, clearly not having the broad education afforded by the merchant navy. I will admit to using to finding whipping easier than splicing, even after discovering that the tool on a pocket knife, that we were always taught was for getting stones out of horses’ hooves, was actually a marlin spike for separating the strands in the rope in order to splice them.

Computer programmers also rely on string. One of the FAQs in Google was “What do you mean by string in 15 C?” I thought that might have had to do with “Air on a G String” which, according to Dr Google is August Wilhelmj’s arrangement of “the second movement of Bach's third Orchestral Suite for violin and an accompaniment of strings” which was “transposed down from its original key (D major) to C major.” and not, as others would have it, a widely reported wardrobe malfunction on the Oscars’ Red Carpet. No, strings, to a computer programmer, are text sequences, as opposed to integers or variables. These strings clearly have a major role to play in the Universe. Again, according to Dr Google, “Since strings are immutable, what these methods really do is create and return a new string that contains the result of the operation.” So these strings can’t be changed but they can generate new strings that contain a result. So “God” is a string, and the “A string” is the second string on my guitar, and a second string is “an alternative resource or course of action in case another one fails.” So I guess that just about ties it all up, no strings attached…

“String is a very important thing...rope is thicker but string is quicker” Spike Milligan

DIGGING INTO THE PAST – REVIEWS OF OLD F&SF Issues While nattering to Bruce about old issues of F&SF Magazine, I figured that I could maintain the pretence that I’m still a science fiction fan by going back over my collection of old issues of F&SF and seeing what they were like and what sorts of material they presented.

Initially I’d hoped to start from my earliest issues – I know I have issues going back into the late 1950s – but they are inconveniently stored at present, and so I’ll start with those that are clearly shelved. I figure that, dealing with one per mailing, I’ll have enough to keep me going for well into the 2030s…

THE MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION July 1969 Cover price 60c Editor Edward L. Ferman Special Fritz Lieber issue Contents:

Short Novel: Ship of Shadows Fritz Leiber Novelet: “Litterbug” Tony Morphett Short Stories: “To Aid and Dissent” Con Pederson; “The Place With No Name” Harlan Ellison; “Transgressor’s Way” Doris Pitkin Buck; A Triptych” Barry Maltzberg Article: “Fritz Leiber (profile)” Judith Merril; “Two At A Time” Isaac Asimov; “Fritz Leiber: A Bibliography” Al Lewis Poem: “Demons of the Upper Air” Fritz Leiber Cartoon: Gahan Wilson. Cover: Ed Emsh for Fritz Leiber

“Fritz Leiber (profile)” Judith Merril; A great article that manages to summarise Leiber’s career to that date and covers the development of science fiction from Gernsback to the early days of “New Wave” science fiction. It gives one a feel for the way that acting and Shakespeare influenced Leiber’s development and it portrays some of the swings in Leiber’s output that were influenced by his character. It also touches on the links between Weird Tales and Unknown and the science fiction magazines of the time. The article also gave me another connection between Jefferson Starship and the science fiction field. Leiber wrote a story “The Girl With The Hungry Eyes” the title of which was stolen by Jefferson Starship for a track on their Freedom At Point Zero album. https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=WDmsS-EZdL4. (Apart from the title, there’s no connection between the song and the story)

Ship of Shadows Fritz Leiber. This is Leiber playing with New Wave concepts. There is the idea that the future will not necessarily be comprehensible. Part of the interest in this story is in trying to work out what is really happening. Male characters are generally given role names such as Spar, Crown, Keeper and Doc, though most of the female characters are given more personal names, such as Suzy and Almodie. They are all on a craft that, while clearly a spaceship of some sort, takes on aspects of a windjammer. Being Leiber, it comes as no surprise that a cat, Kim, features strongly in the story. Throughout the tale there is a nightmarish aspect to everything and to the characters who could very well have stepped out of an absurdist drama or from a Bob Dylan lyric. Drugs are central to the story and Spar, the protagonist is far from perfect physically or mentally. There may or may not be vampires and werewolves aboard and the days of the week are as cryptically named as the characters: Loafday, Playday, Sleepday, and Workday.

That the entire story is set in freefall is hinted at, while not directly stated. The food and drink all come in pouches and the characters navigate through the ship by way of a central spine along which they can pull themselves. To remove all doubt, three of Spar’s enemies are killed by explosive decompression. And, as Spar navigates the different parts of the ship, he puts pieces of the puzzle together as he regains his lost eyesight and teeth. Finally he becomes an active participant in events, rather than a clueless victim.

In a way Leiber reverts to more standard story telling at the end of the tale. Everything is drawn together into a fairly standard genre trope. It’s not an easy story to read and the set up doesn’t engage the imagine as well as, say, 16 Cordwainer Smith’s stranger stories, but I can certainly understand Judith Merril’s enthusiasm for his work. I may well go back over some of the Leiber that has been gathering dust on the bookshelves.

“Demons of the Upper Air” Fritz Leiber. This is a short poem that somehow combines aspects of the space age and Lovecraft’s Elder Gods. I can’t help but admire a poem that includes the word “eldritch”.

“To Aid and Dissent” Con Pederson. According to ISFDB the last of Pederson’s stories, the first being published in 1953. This suffers a little compared to the Leiber that preceded it. It certainly has relevance, touching on a time when we can treat artificial intelligences as badly as we have, in the past, treated native guides. The central character is a sherpa – a class of emergency supply ships orbiting Mars ready to provide supplies to human explorers on the planet’s surface. The AI is achieved by linking primate brains together, thus drawing comparison with Cordwainer Smith’s Underpeople. The issue is that they are expendable. When they are required to land on Mars, they are left there to die. The AI is far more interesting than its human directors who come across as the standard military derived functionaries but the brevity of the story does not give much room to develop the conceit and the story is fitted with a generic plot twist. The story set me thinking of the intelligent bomb in Dark Star but without the detailed dialog.

While I may not have found the late Harlan Ellison a pleasant person, he could certainly write. “The Place With No Name” is a story that draws one in from the first line and while it becomes more difficult to follow later in the story, there is no doubting that this is the work of an accomplished writer. This is a clever synthesis of gritty New York realism with South American and Greek mythology, with a touch of genuine science fiction tossed in for good luck. Ellison’s straight descriptive passages are strong and evocative. At times, certainly in the first section of the story, the way Ellison directly addresses his audience can seem a little to “cute” but that does give that section a certain hip credibility, as do references to hookers and cocaine. The protagonist is not likeable but there is a certain tragic grandeur in his eventual fate.

I’d always been under the impression that Doris Pitkin Buck was one of the better and more literate writers in our field but “Transgressor’s Way” is not good evidence for this. It’s a retelling of a traditional fairy tale but without the horror of the original tale. The dialogue is stilted, not quite in the forsooth dialect, but fairly close. The final scene in the story does not really add anything. This type of thing was later to be done far better by Tanith Lee in her Red As Blood collection.

They say that sf has very little predictive ability but, occasionally, it does hit the nail on the head. Barry Maltzberg’s “A Triptych” manages to eerily presage the “Big Brother” phenomenon, while appearing to be about three astronauts whose lives are circumscribed by what they can and can’t say or do when on air. It’s a brief mood piece with little in the way of plot but it does deal with the intricacies of interpersonal relationships in a small space capsule. It also covers such space travel realities, like astronauts and their waste products. The actual details of their space voyage aren’t made clear – perhaps it’s an Apollo type Moon mission but that’s secondary to the thoughts about how interactions can affect the astronauts.

Isaac Asimov’s “Two At A Time” is an example of Asimov’s ability as a communicator of scientific ideas. He covers clearly the history of our ability to calculate planetary data based on the orbits and Newton’s gravity equations. It covers the nature of the Three Body problem and includes insight on how scientific principals can be used within the appropriate parameters. These columns remain a highlight of my F&SF reading but, as an ex-science teacher, I guess I’m biased.

“Litterbug” by Tony Morphett is a one idea story extended a little too far. It’s that staple of science fiction, a humorous story that looks at a strange discovery and at its implications. The central concept in the story was previously used in Harry Harrison’s Bill the Galactic Hero and Morphett adds little to the idea of using matter transmitters to dispose of garbage. It’s not bad, but has nowhere near the humour required to make it interesting. Keith Laumer carried this sort of idea far more effectively.

Just to finish with this issue, I couldn’t resist flicking my eyes over the Market Place. My favourite item from this ran as follows:

We propose to finance the development of projects on alterations of Force Fields, Time and Space. If you have a project, contact IBEA R. Mario Cardim 398, ap 23 Sao Paulo, Sp Brasil. This sounds like the beginning of a bad science fiction story in its own right.

17 A listing of ANZAPA Official Bloody Editors and Official Bloody Presidents 1968-2019

A listing of ANZAPA OBEs and OBPs. I guess I should have gone through the Emergency Editors too. Perhaps next time… OBEs OBPs 1-7 Leigh Edmonds 1-24 No president 8 John Bangsund 25-34 Bruce Gillespie 9-15 Gary Mason 35-39 David Grigg 16 Peter Darling 40-45 John Bangsund 17-22 Dennis Stocks 46-51 Eric Lindsay 23-30 Leigh Edmonds 52-57 Bill Wright 30-37 David Grigg 58-63 Keith Taylor 38-43 John Foyster 64-69 John & Sally Bangsund 44-45 Derrick Ashby 70-75 Helen Swift & Perry Middlemiss 46 Don Ashby 76-81 David Grigg 47-51 Carey Handfield 82-87 Leanne Frahm 52 Leigh Edmonds 88-93 Joseph Nicholas 53-55 Carey Handfield 94-99 David Grigg 56-61 John Bangsund 100-105 Leanne Frahm 62-63 Gary Mason 106-111 Cath & Marc Ortlieb 64 Leigh Edmonds 112-117 Bruce Gillespie 65-73 Gary Mason 118-123 MarcOrtlieb 74-79 John Foyster 124-129 Eric Lindsay & Jean Weber 80-85 Derrick & Christine Ashby 130-135 Denny Lien 86-91 Marc Ortlieb 136-141 Jean Weber 92-95 Gary Mason 142 None 96-99 Jean Weber 143-148 Cath Ortlieb 100 Leigh Edmonds 149-154 Bruce Gillespie 101-109 Jean Weber 155-159 David Grigg 110-115 Marc Ortlieb 160-165 Leanne Frahm 116-127 Gerald Smith 166-171 Jeanne Mealy 128-145 LynC & Clive Newall 172-176 Terry Frost 146-169 Alan Stewart 177 Vacant 170-194 Marc Ortlieb 178-183 Leanne Frahm 195 Sue & David Grigg 184-190 Jean Weber & Eric Lindsay 196-206 Sue Grigg 191-196 Bruce Gillespie 207-219 David Grigg 197-202 Bill Wright 220-308 Bruce Gillespie 203-208 Leanne Frahm 209-214 Jack Herman 215-220 David Grigg 221-226 Sally Yeoland 227-232 Bill Wright 233-238 Bruce Gillespie 239-244 Bill Wright 245-250 Dan McCarthy 251-256 Jack Herman 257-262 Claire Brialey 263-268 Bruce Gillespie 269-274 Claire Brialey 275-280 Jack Herman 281-286 Claire Brialey 287-292 Bruce Gillespie 293-298 Gary Mason 299-304 Jack Herman 304-308 Claire Brialey

18 Knot Hole

Produced for ANZAPA by Marc Ortlieb P.O. Box 215 Forest Hill Vic 3131 Australia.

WHEN IS A HOLE NOT A HOLE? OR IS HALF A HOLE A WHOLE? The semantics of Black Holes and the Big Bang.

Part of the problem with the way physics uses words is that, occasionally, they will use terms that everyone thinks they understand but which physicists use in a very technical sense. I touched on that in my previous contribution when I was talking about string theory. Terms like “The Big Bang” have problems among the public who believe that, having seen the term, they are free to use it to mean what they think it means. Much like Humpty Dumpty when they use a word it means just what they choose it to mean – neither more nor less. So I’ve been watching a number of YouTube videos, many from The Atheist Experience, where people with no idea about science phone in to give their proof that “Darwinists” have got it all wrong, despite the fact that, as Matt Dillahunty usually points out, their show is about atheism not science and that, if they could really prove evolution wrong, they should be talking to scientists and booking their flights to Stockholm to collect their Nobel Prizes. A great number of the theist callers also tend to lump anything they don’t like about science into a catch-all, promoted by people they call either “evolutionists” or “Darwinists”. They start trying to explain why the theory of evolution is wrong but the arguments they raise often relate to either cosmology or abiogenesis and it doesn’t seem to matter how often Matt and his co-panelists explain what evolutionary theory is, they keep trying to drag in the Big Bang and the impossibility of life arising out of non-life. I suspect that a lot of the confusion comes from the way science is taught in schools and explained in the media and I don’t class myself as guiltless in the former. I used to have fun arguments with one ex-student over the possibility of evolution but had not armed myself with a deep enough understanding of evolutionary theory to counter all of the arguments that he’d picked up. Part of this stemmed from the misuse of terms like “random” and “explosion”. When people use terms like “The Big Bang” they tend to picture a huge explosion in space. I suspect that Fred Hoyle wasn’t too unhappy at this, as he coined the term to make fun of the theory that opposed his Steady State Theory, which was also designed to explain the observation that the galaxies were moving apart. Hoyle’s idea was that, as the galaxies moved further apart, new matter was generated, filling the void and maintaining a constant density of matter in the universe. Some theists have taken the idea of the Big Bang and picture it as a literal explosion. They then point it that explosions destroy things, they don’t create things and so the degree of order in the universe doesn’t make sense. Like my ex-student, they point to the logical absurdity of a hurricane going through a junkyard and assembling a functional Boeing 727. The problem is that the Big Bang wasn’t a literal explosion. Physicists are still arguing over exactly how it happened and there is still disagreement over why our universe came to be predominated by matter, given that most theories of the formation of the universe assume that equal amounts of matter and antimatter were produced. Much work has been done and is still being done, in an attempt to discover mechanisms that preference matter over anti-matter but, regardless of the current limits of the theories, what is certain is that the Big Bang wasn’t an explosion in the sense of a stick of dynamite or an atomic bomb, it was the very rapid expansion of space-time itself. As to where the “substance” of the Universe came from physicists do not have a problem with quantum fluctuations in a vacuum generating that “substance”. But again we are let down through trying to use ordinary language terms to explain complex concepts in physics. A standard argument from some theists is that you can’t get Something from Nothing and they will quote assorted philosophers in an attempt to prove their point. The trouble is that the philosophical meaning of Nothing does not equate by what physicists see in Nothing. Where philosophers see Nothing as an absence of Anything, physicists see nothing as a seething mass of potential matter and energy which, if added together comes to zero, much as plus one and minus one, if you add them are zero, but which, when separated have a non zero existence. Isaac Asimov touched on this in one of his F&SF essays, “I’m looking over a four-leafed clover”. In the Scottish play, Shakespeare intuited it in stating

Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player That struts and frets his hour upon the stage And then is heard no more. It is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury Signifying nothing.

While playing with semantics may seem adequate to some, to a physicist the proof is in observation and experiments with the Casimir Effect do match the predictions that there is energy in a vacuum.

19 To fully appreciate these fine distinctions one must understand the complex mathematics behind it and I’m the first person to admit that I don’t. Such admissions often lead the more vocal opponents of a scientific explanation of the origin of the Universe to claim that accepting the scientific explanation requires just as much faith as does believing that a god created the Universe. This is yet another example of the two arguments being separated by a common language. (That paraphrase, in itself, has enough uncertainty problems being attributed to Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw and Winston Churchill.) Faith may be defined as believing in something without having concrete evidence. I suppose I do believe scientific statements without having the time, wherewithal or ability to test them myself but, on the basis of past performance I’m inclined to accept a statement from scientists because I know that they have carried out extensive research and because I know that there are other scientists out there trying their damnedest to prove them wrong – and, if they do so, then the model will change to accommodate the new data. My understanding of faith in a god seems to rely on only accepting the evidence that supports the theist position while ignoring anything that contradicts it. Yes, I have faith that it will get light again tomorrow morning and science and observations make predictions about when that will occur. Those predictions have proved true for every case, weather and huge asteroids permitting, that has been recorded. Religious faith seems to rely more on personal revelation rather than on weighing the evidence. There we have it; explosions aren’t explosions, Nothing isn’t nothing and the Big Bang wouldn’t have made a bang as it wasn’t an explosion but a rapid expansion of space-time. Besides, in a vacuum, no one can hear you fart much less bang and so there wouldn’t have been a noise and, as all good Myth Buster fans know, there’s no point in having an explosion unless it’s a really loud one. But what of Black Holes? Well, we all know what holes are. They are the things that dogs dig in back gardens, that moth larvae leave in sweaters and that politicians leave in their arguments. But is a Black Hole really a hole? It would seem to me that a Black Hole is more a presence than an absence and that has been indicated only too well by recent observations – the detection of gravity waves from the merging of two black holes and the more recent “photographs” of the black hole in Messier 87. To suggest that a hole is an absence leaves one open to the conundrum, if it takes ten men ten days to dig a hole, how long will it take five men to dig half a hole? That suggests that a half a hole isn’t a whole hole which is wholly wrong. A Black Hole is a decided presence and sf writers have had all sorts of fun with them – my favourite example being one of Colin Kapp’s stories, “The Black Hole Of Negrav” in which the Unorthodox Engineers use a mini Black Hole to carve a space station out of the solid nickel-iron core of a planet. But, if a hole is a hole, where might it lead? Alice found it led to Wonderland and some science fiction writers and physicists have speculated that, since the mass of a Black Hole warps space, it could be used to subvert the speed of light and to get from one place in space to another without going through the intervening space. But the physics of Black Holes leads to all sorts of counter-intuitive issues tied up in the fact that the nature of space time becomes really weird in the presence of very strong gravitational fields. And so, although a Black Hole does suck in everything that gets close enough, it isn’t really a hole, it’s an incredible concentration of mass that creates an incredibly strong gravitational force. That said, I certainly wouldn’t discourage science fiction writers from playing with concepts related to Black Holes. Just to effect that they can have on the nature of time is sufficiently interesting to spawn a dozen or so sf stories, to say nothing of such puns as Arthur C. Clarke perpetrated in “Neutron Tide’ – which was, admittedly about a neutron star, not a black hole. The concept of spaghettification near a Black Hole lends credibility to the cult of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. But please people, do check the science before pontificating about the Big Bang or the potential of Black Holes. Perhaps The Tom Tom Club summarised the issue in “wordyrappinghood”

“Words are like a certain person Who can't say what they mean Don't mean what they say”

TUNICATES, MICROEVOLUTION AND MACROEVOLUTION.

50 shades of grey and the species continuum.

In the last ANZAPA, Michael Green mentioned tunicates and, in my mailing comment reply, I committed an incomplete sentence “The fact that one tadpole like creature branched off in this direction, while another became ancestral to the craniates.” This is an attempt to complete that sentence, but I suspect that it’s going to grow into something much larger.

Tunicates are a fascinating group of animals with a lifecycle that would make for an interesting science fiction story or two. Many tunicates are hermaphrodites, producing both sperm and eggs. In some species the eggs are retained in the oviduct until fertilized by free-swimming sperm from other tunicates. The eggs and sperm in any individual mature at different times to avoid self-fertilisation. Other species simply release sperm and eggs into the water in the hope that the twain shall meet. To further complicate matters, some reproduce by budding in good conditions, but sexually when conditions get rough, like Daphnia. In those cases where sexual reproduction takes place, the fertilized egg is then released and develops into a short lived free swimming larval form that looks a bit like a tadpole. This creature then settles on a rock and metamorphoses into the adult form, a sessile filter-feeder that, in due time, produces its own eggs and sperm etc. Anglers in New South Wales regularly use tunicates, which they call cunjevoi or cunjies, as bait. Although I have found references to their distribution being along the southern coast of Australia, from Queensland 20 to Western Australia, I can’t remember seeing them when I used to go fishing as a teenager.

The metamorphosis is the interesting bit. The larva has a notocord, the basis of the backbone in vertebrates, leading some biologists to suggest that the vertebrates are simply neotenous descendents of an organism similar to a tunicate. Neoteny is interesting in itself. It occurs in axolotls or Mexican walking fish. The axolotl looks and behaves like an over-grown salamander larva, reproducing in its “larval” state. It has been shown that, by injecting axolotls with the correct hormones, they can be induced to undergo metamorphosis into a salamander resembling the tiger salamander, to which, it is believed, they are closely related. It has even been suggested that neoteny is the reason that hominids separated from the line that led to chimpanzees and bonobos. Humans possess several traits that are common in Gorilla and chimp babies but not in the adults. I have a very vague recollection of a science fiction story in which a scientist develops a hormone, similar to the thyroid stimulating hormone that allows axolotls to develop into salamanders, and uses it to metamorphose a human baby into a gorilla-like adult. Who knows? Perhaps our entire psychology is simply due to our never having matured. Looking at the behaviour of some of our political leaders, that seems uncomfortably plausible. I’m starting to believe that I’m maturing into a sessile filter feeder myself. I’m certainly not the free roaming larva that I once was and, even when I am on the move, on my bicycle, car drivers regularly suggest that I’m capable of self-fertilisation. In so humble a creature as the tunicate, and through the process of neoteny, one can see clear pathways for the evolution of the vertebrates. It’s not too hard to imagine an organism like the larva of a tunicate reproducing in its larval state and so giving rise to a whole group of free-living organisms that never really grows up. True, we have abandoned the hermaphroditic nature of that early relative of the tunicates but that again suggests the potential for a science fiction story or two. The creationists who phone in to The Atheist Experience often create a dichotomy between macroevolution, which they characterize as dogs turning into cats, or their fabled crocoduck – a cross between a crocodile and a duck, and microevolution, where organisms can change a little bit but where they still remain members of the same “kind” – a taxonomic category which they seem hesitant to define. However organisms such as tunicates, axolotls and neotenous chimpanzees give a clear mechanism for small scale changes resulting in serious branching in the evolutionary tree. At the risk of really annoying Richard Dawkins I’d suggest that punctuated equilibrium, through the mechanism of neoteny, could well exist – the changes are small, allowing for hybridization between generations, but they can create large morphological differences through minor mutations. But this isn’t the same as the creationists bizarre straw man argument about a cat giving birth to a dog and then the dog having nothing to mate with. The true nature of evolutionary change can be seen both in ring species and in clines in species such as Eucalyptus melanophloia and Eucalyptus whitei. Clines occur when you have a clearly distinct species at one end of a geographical distribution, another distinctive species at the other end of the distribution and various degrees of hybridization in the middle of the distribution. This shows quite clearly that you can have microevolution along the cline or ring, but end up with macroevolution, i.e. speciation, at each end of the distribution. But then the creationists bring up the idea of kind; they may be different species, incapable of producing fertile offspring, but they’re still seagulls – they’re still the same kind of creature… These people simply don’t understand the nature of continua and so should attend more Melbourne Science Fiction Conventions. I did attend an interesting “Ace Double” panel at the most recent Continuum which portmanteaued two panels, one on human evolution and the other on the historical Merlin but I can’t quite see your average creationists expanding their minds at such events. Through their religion they are so used to seeing things in terms of Good and Bad, black and white that they can’t enjoy the myriad shades of grey. I guess the little oddities in the web of life still have the capacity to fascinate me and my soft spot for the little side branches on the evolutionary bush remains as squishy as ever. So thank you to Michael Green for giving me an opportunity to free associate a little more. 21 DIGGING INTO THE PAST – REVIEWS OF OLD F&SF Issues While nattering to Bruce about old issues of F&SF Magazine, I figured that I could maintain the pretence that I’m still a science fiction fan by going back over my collection of old issues of F&SF and seeing what they were like and what sorts of material they presented.

Initially I’d hoped to start from my earliest issues – I know I have issues going back into the late 1950s – but they are inconveniently stored at present, and so I’ll start with those that are clearly shelved. I figure that, dealing with one per mailing, I’ll have enough to keep me going for well into the 2030s…

THE MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION August 1969 Cover price 60c Editor Edward L. Ferman

Contents:

Novelets: “An Adventure in the Yolla Bolly Middle Eel Wilderness”, Vance Aandahl; “The Shamblers of Misery”, Joseph Green; “The Money Builder”, Paul Thielen Short Stories: “Next”, Gary Jennings; “Fraternity Brother”, Sterling E. Lanier; “From the Darkness and the Depths”, Morgan Robertson Article: “On Throwing a Ball” Isaac Asimov Film Review: The Illustrated Man Samuel R. Delany Cartoon: Gahan Wilson. Books: Joanna Russ Cover: Ronald Walotsky for “An Adventure in the Yolla Bolly Middle Eel Wilderness”

The first story in this issue“An Adventure in the Yolla Bolly Middle Eel Wilderness” by Vance Aandahl is a close encounters of the seventh kind variation based on the legend of Bigfoot. A somewhat repressed and mechanically incompetent literature teacher finds himself stranded in the wilderness, only to be found by the last remaining female Bigfoot who is searching for a mate. The story’s tragic ending is somehow typical of some of the negativity that struck mainstream science fiction in the late 1960s. The swapping between human and Bigfoot point of view is interesting and Aandahl gets one thinking that if Bigfoot did exist, this would be likely to be her situation.

Gahan Wilson’s cartoon of UFO’s towing advertisements for The Truth About Saucers is typical of his twisted approach to the universe well before Gary Larson took up the cause. Checking Dr Google, I discovered that Wilson, born in 1930, is still alive, though I gather he has not been published for a number of years. A Facebook article mentioned his struggles with dementia, which explains his absence from publications.

Joanna Russ’s Books column covers Ron Goulart’s The Sword Swallower, Avram Davidson’s The Phoenix and the Mirror, Hal Clement’s Small Changes, Poul Anderson’s 7 Conquests and The Best SF Stories From New Worlds #2. Russ’s critiques are always pithy and littered with such observations as “Either you follow this patiently or you deserve to be shut up in a television set and forced to read Marvel comics until your brain turns to oatmeal”. Her review if the New Worlds anthology has some interesting observations on early New Wave science fiction.

Joseph Green’s “The Shamblers of Misery” is one of his Conscience Interplanetary series, dealing with Allan Odegaard, a sort of Interplanetary Marshall tasked with investigating Earth’s colonies on other planets in order to ensure that any intelligent or potentially intelligent native life-forms aren’t exploited by colonists. Other aspects of the story link it to the 60s new found interest in ecology. Rather than experiment with style, as Silverberg did while dealing with similar issues in his story “Sundance” in the June 1969 F&SF, Green plays it as straight narrative, his point of view character being a fairly typical 1960s hero scientist, with a touch of the noble hero– fighting the villains resisting the advances of the strong but attractive female scientist and solving the mystery in such a wav that the humans and the natives come out ahead. It’s the sort of story that brought me into science fiction and I will admit a fondness for it. There is a collection of four of these stories – including this one - Conscience Interplanetary (Science Fiction Book Club, 1973). I note from ISFDB that Green had new novels published in 2017 & 2018.

Gary Jennings’ short story “Next” continues the themes of car troubles in the wilderness, an ineffectual older man, a little sex and death, but it goes in very different directions to Vance Aandahl’s story. Apart from the sex, it would have made an excellent Twilight Zone story. Jennings was a mainstream novelist who drew much of his inspiration from his time in Mexico and this story does make some use of its Mexican setting. No real surprises as the story telegraphs its ending fairly early in the piece.

From the tone of the review, Samuel Delany was disappointed in the film version of Ray Bradbury’s The Illustrated Man. He notes the strengths in the cinematography and in Rod Steiger’s performance but notes its weakness in dealing with a positive future. Mind you, I’d always found Bradbury more of an author who looked back with nostalgia rather than looking forward with optimism.

Sterling E. Lanier’s “Fraternity Brother” belongs to the tradition of improbable stories told in bars – a sub- genre also mined by Arthur C. Clarke in his Tales From the White Hart. This one has echoes of H.P. Lovecraft’s Elder

22 Races stories as Brigadier Ffellowes narrates the story of his encounters with one of the earliest secret societies. This one appeared in the first FFellowes collection, The Peculiar Exploits of Brigadier Ffellowes. A good read that reflects Lanier’s background in anthropology. Until reading his Wikipedia entry, I hadn’t realised that, as an editor, Lanier was a key figure in ensuring that Frank Herbert’s Dune got published.

Morgan Robertson’s “From the Darkness and the Depths” is a reprint from 1913. The science is dated, which gives the story a certain charm and I smiled when I read the sentence explaining that X-rays can’t be reflected nor refracted. The mention of one character, a German professor, using a Wimshurst machine to generate a huge electric spark also evoked the time of the story – set during the eruption of Krakatoa in 1883. The nature of the story also fits its milieu – an entire shipload of sailors in the tropics is menaced by an invisible giant vampire squid and only two people survive to tell the tale. I found the science more interesting than the story, but I guess that’s fine, as I could easily say the same for more recent hard-science sf stories. As a side note, the introduction to the story credits Robertson with a tale “Futility” which, though written in 1898, seems strangely prescient in describing the sinking of a supposedly unsinkable ship called the Titan.

“On Throwing a Ball” by Isaac Asimov is another of Asimov’s excellent science columns, this time dealing with Newton’s Laws of Motion and how the general equation for gravitational force is derived. It’s all leading up to how the mass of the Earth was calculated. Stephen Hawking claimed that he only put one equation e=mc2 in A Brief History of Time because he was told that every equation used halved the sales of the book. This issue of F&SF should then have sold only n/217 copies, with n being the number usually sold or 1/131072 of the copies normally sold. Given that F&SF quotes its paid circulation at 60,000 and that this issue has 130 pages, that means that only 59.5 pages of this issue would have sold. It’s still a good article though.

Given the title of the Asimov piece, I’m guessing that Ed Ferman couldn’t resist following it with a story about the use of alien science to manipulate the results of ball games. “The Money Builder” by Paul Thielen is just such a story. It manages to combine the American version of the improbable story told in bars with a sort of flip New York style. I’m afraid that I found this one just a little too pedestrian. Perhaps had I not enjoyed what Spider Robinson did with the Callahan’s bar stories, I might have been more impressed but, despite the editor’s claim that the story is funny, I didn’t find the humour worth the effort of reading this. The premise is fine – that a human with access to a gravity distorter could make a fortune using it to fix sporting results – it’s just that the story didn’t seem to go anywhere.

DIGGING INTO THE PAST - A LITTLE BIT OF FAN HISTORY

In my tidying up, I’ve discovered some old copies of The Phantom Zine, an apa run by Larry Dunning from Western Australia in the 1980s. The issue I’m looking at is #8 from February 1981, with the following membership list: Larry Dunning (W.A.), Harry Andruschak U.S.A.), K. Adrian Bedford (W.A.), Damian Brennan (W.A.), Alison Cowling (Vic), Chris de Fries (W.A.), Kevin Dillon (N.S.W.), Richard Faulder (N.S.W.), Stephen Gunnell (A.C.T.), Joseph Italiano (Vic), Seth Lockwood (W.A.), Marc Ortlieb (S.A.), John Packer (S.A.), Cefn Ridout (W.A.), Michael Schaper (W.A.), Christine Smith (N.S.W.), Moris Sztajer (Vic), Bruce Taplin (W.A.), Coralie Throp (W.A.), Greg Turkich (Qld), Sally Underwood (W.A.), Gary Ware (Qld), MISTER Warner (W.A.) and Gordon Wilkinson Cox (W.A.). Interesting to note that, from the list there are two people whom I see fairly regularly – Seth and Julian, who are part of our regular poker playing group – three ex-Western Australians with Cindy making up the trio, two Melbourneans, Carey and Justin and one ex-South Australian, me. There are a few I’d see on Facebook every now and then, Christine Smith (now Freels, but she’s now abandoned Facebook), Richard Faulder, who hasn’t posted on Facebook in quite a while and Sally Underwood (now Beasley). K. Adrian Bedford, I gather, now writes books. The Fremantle Press web page notes K.A. Bedford is the author of Orbital Burn, Eclipse, Hydrogen Steel, Time Machines Repaired While-U-Wait and Paradox Resolution. Kevin Dillon and John Packer have died. As for the others, who knows? Greg Turkich was, the last I heard, with the Federal police in Canberra. At the time of this issue he was in the army in Queensland. Harry Andruschak, from California, used to bombard apas, including Australian apas, with NASA & JPL fliers. He has a listing in the Internet Speculative Fiction Database but with no recent activity noted. A couple of the other names are vaguely familiar but are people I haven’t heard of since my involvement with The Phantom Zine. And so to the contents. The cover you can see. The Official Stuff is fairly typical of apas at the time. It is also fairly typical of Australian apas of the time in that it contains a mixture of zines from people fairly familiar with apas, through ANZAPA or FAPA and some who had come into fandom via comic fandom. Christine’s cartoons reference a cartoon war that she, John Packer and Jane Taubman were having – snails vs triffids vs Jane’s Schnozzes. Julian Warner, who was insisting on being called MISTER Warner provides a good con report and Seth’s writing is always worth reading, even though he doesn’t seem to do any of it now. Like Applesauce, The Phantom Zine provided an opportunity for Australian fans who couldn’t be bothered hanging around on ANZAPA’s waiting list to publish zines, some of which had a regional flavour missing from the largely Melbourne-centric ANZAPA.

23 OFFICIAL STUFF Larry 2pp Administrative stuff – Faulder, Packer & Ware Dunning at risk of minacing out A LETTER FROM THE Alison 2pp Mailing Comments SMARTIE FACTORY Cowling ICON 3 Cefn Ridout 12pp Diary natter, MCs, Artwork PHANTOMIMEO Julian Warner 4pp Swancon 5 Report APOCOLYPTIC VIEWS Larry 4pp Film Reviews, gaming, music reviews, poem Dunning ECHO BEACH QUARTERLY Marc Ortlieb 4pp Television & Tom Verlaine, MCs 18, THE COMMITING SODOMY IN Harry J.N. 1p dropping out of Phantom Zine THE PHANTOM ZINE Andruschak THE EXPLOITS OF THE Christine 12pp Snail comic strip, Syncon attendees drawn as INCOMPARABLE Smith snails ESCARGOT: PIPSQUEAK MOSTAYS RAMBLINGS Morris Sztajer 4pp Diary natter, movies, comic fandom and possible convention, fantasy reading JOURNAL OF THE Seth 6pp Drinking Punch, faan fiction, recent reading & CHIPPING WARDEN Lockwood MCs CORYBANTIC SOCIETY AND GLEE CLUB 2 MY ID Joseph 6pp Problems with the Australian Comic Collector, Italiano Advert for business, Canberra War Game Convention report, MCS STEVEG HACKER & Co 4 Stephen 4pp General natter, MCs, Circulation 1 Advert Gunnell PUDDNS PIECE K. Adrian 4pp Travel to Adelaide, MCs, natter Bedford NASA FLYERS Harry J.N. 4pp Pioneer 11 & Jupiter cloud photos Andruschak BUOYANT STRUDEL 2 Michael 4pp Experiences sailing, Statistics for Phantom Schaper Zine Mailings 1-7, MCs

I know a number of ANZAPAns don’t do Facebook but, should you be so tempted, Richard Hryckiewicz has been posting a large number of photos from the early 1980s, particularly from Swancon 5, Unicon VI and A-Con 8. I’m rather fond of this one from A-Con 8 that is one of the few photos I have of Rob Lock from a fan event. Thanks Richard. I’m not sure about the bloke with the large moustache, but the others in the photo are Steve James, Rob Lock, David Hodson and Peter Toluzzi. I wouldn’t be at all surprised to find that it was a panel on sf music. Richard’s site is Australian SF Convention Photos: https://www.facebook.com/Australian-SF-Convention- Photos-602681106911157/

24 BACK TO THE FUTURE

THE MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION May/Jun 2019 Cover price $8.99 Editor C.C. Finlay

Contents: Novellas: “New Atlantis” Lavie Tidhar Novelets: “Thirty-Three Wicked Daughters”, Kelly Barnhill; “How to Kiss a Hojacki”, Debbie Urbanski, “Sternutative Sortilege”, Matthew Hughes Short Stories: “The Abundance”, Andy Dudak; “Breath”, Bruce McAllister; “The Moss Kings”, David Gullen, “Second Skin”, Pip Coen; “The Fourth Trimester Is the Strangest” Rebecca Campbell; “Apocalypse Considered Through a Helix of Semiprecious Foods and Recipes” Tobias S. Buckell Poems: “Guinevere”, Mary Soon Lee; “From Tierra Del Fuego to the Moluccas”, Gretchen Tessmer Books to Look For Charles de Lint. Books Elizabeth Hand. Films: Bird Box Never Quite Takes Off Karin Lowachee. Science: How to Calculate an Orbit Jerry Oltion Competition #97 Curiosities Paul Di Filippo Cartoons: Danny Shanahan, Arthur Masear, S. Harris. Cover: Cory and Catska Ench for "New Atlantis" This purchase was one result of my recent attendance at Continuum 15, this year’s Natcon in Melbourne. I made the mistake of wondering into the dealers’ room to talk to Justin Ackroyd. I ended up leaving with A Giant Leap To Never Never, Marcin Klak’s 2018 GUFF trip report, Cary Lenehan’s Warriors of Vhast: Intimations of Evil, Rivqa Rafael & Tansy Rayner Roberts’ anthology Mother Of Invention and the above mentioned issue of F&SF which I bought with the specific purpose of comparing it to the 1960s F&SFs that I’ve been working my way through. The reasons for my other purchases were less clear. The trip report I bought because I buy trip reports and I was stunned to see one that looked like a real paperback book; The Lenehan I bought because I like reading books written by people I’ve met and the anthology I bought because it had featured so prominently in the previous afternoon’s Ditmar Award presentations and I wanted to find out why. But on to F&SF May/June 2019. It looks like the older incarnation of the magazine – the size and layout are similar and the internal organisation follows the same pattern. The difference is in the “cast list”. I’ve been so lax in reading recent sf that I didn’t recognise the names of any of the authors. The editorial comment on his story notes that Bruce McAllister’s career spans five decades but, despite a slight twinge of memory, I can’t say that I could recall anything he’d written. (Wikipedia tells me he has had two pieces of short fiction on the Hugo ballot in 1988 and 2007, his 1988 story “Dream Baby” appearing on the Nebula ballot as well.) “The Abundance” by Andy Duda is a puzzle story. It creates a confusing maelstrom of images and you need to get to the end of the story before you really get any inkling of what the piece is actually about. It is very trendy, incorporating aspects of steam-punk and virtual reality, along with what appears to be some advanced biological science but which may simply be the creation of virtual ecosystems. It took me two readings to come to grips with this one – interesting in terms of technique and ideas but it doesn’t really engage me. I know that sf isn’t always strong on characters but I could not really connect with the issues faced by the narrator here. “Thirty-Three Wicked Daughters” by Kelly Barnhill is the sort of fractured fairy tale in which F&SF has prided itself. It uses the fairy tale format to make pointed references to injustices in our current world, injecting a measure of feminist theory and self-conscious political correctness. I note from her Wikipedia biography that Barnhill is from Minneapolis and has won a World Fantasy Award for her novella “The Unlicensed Magician”. I’m filing this one as excessively cute; it even ends with one of those great “plot not”s in which the story purports to be a foundation myth for a great country. (Not the U.S.A..) “Guinevere” by Mary Soon Lee is the first of the poems in the issue. In the past, F&SF has been one of the few commercial outlets for Fantasy or Science Fictional poetry. This one is a conceit relating a stillbirth to the Arthurian tragedy of Guinevere. There’s a touch of Sylvia Plath – “The moon waxed full” but the suggestion that the mythical Guinevere suffered a stillbirth isn’t supported in the literature. “Breath” by Bruce McAllister also deals with the issue of childlessness and it looks at the extents to which men may go to support their wives even risking the taunts of more macho men. It’s more a vignette than a short story but is effective in conveying its message. Given my eschewing of the genre recently, the two book review columns didn’t really help me much. As with the contents of the issue over all, the list of reviewed books here did not strike many sparks of remembrance, merely reminding me that, despite my lack of interest, the genre has continued to flourish. Charles de Lint does allow one name to resurface in his review of Jeanne Gomoll’s Space Babe Colouring Book, being sold to support the James Tiptree Jr Award. 25 Lavie Tidhar’s “New Atlantis” reminds me of why I like reading science fiction. It’s a great post-apocalyptic story that creates a world as rich as that in Brian Aldiss’s Hothouse with echoes of the world that Cordwainer Smith created for his story “Mark Elf”. Indeed, this could well be that same world, as Tidhar incorporates manshonyaggers into his scenario. In other places the story brings in Lewis Carroll and the appearance of sentient ants, along with an ancient robot from the time of man, reminded me of Clifford Simak’s “City”. The story is a quest, involving a journey to Albion and a trip into a virtual world, where long-dead intelligences live in a simulated environment. Tidhar treads that fine line between making things too alien for the reader to take in and making things too mundane to be convincingly futuristic. I must looks up some of Tidhar’s other work. His Wikipedia entry, while noting Smith & Simak as influences, provides an interesting catalog of work. He’s clearly a writer I should have encountered earlier. Gretchen Tessmer’s poem “From Tierra Del Fuego to the Moluccas” also suffers from an attack of the Plaths. I read “where we emerge/like phoenixes/breaking the waterline/our eyes smoked to ash/and our hair/streaked with orange fire” and I think “Out of the ash/I rise with my red hair/And I eat men like air.” From “Lady Lazarus”. I just found this one a tad clumsy. “The Moss Kings” by David Gullen is an idiosyncratic fantasy that reads like the prequel to a trilogy or two. Gullen has created a cast of bizarre creatures in a world of herbal magic and strictly prescribed gestures. Mixed in with this are a warrior uber-class, some form of clerical/scientist caste and a general run of small hamlets and peasants. The language is deliberate pseudo-germanic agglutination with the woodland creatures referred to as thorn-wilds and elm- hates. There is a certain self-conscious literariness in the writing that suggests that the author has been spending too much time with a medieval thesaurus. All that is missing from this is an Arthur Rackham illustration. “How to Kiss a Hojacki” by Debbie Urbanski is a terribly tedious read. I’ve taken three attempts at completing it, and my eyes glaze over. It purports to be about women undergoing some sort of metamorphosis while dealing symbolically with the way that relationships change and become less physical. But I ploughed on with it, hoping that it would become something more interesting. When I finally reached the end I was no more enlightened than I’d been before starting it. It’s an idea that might have made a passable poem, but most of it is straight filler. I know that F&SF will occasionally stray out of science fiction into those grey areas between spec-fic and mainstream but this story goes nowhere. Pip Coen’s “Second Skin” is a more traditional soft horror story set in backwoods America. There is a hint of mystery and an acceptable plot, dealing with sibling rivalry in a metaphorical manner. It certainly seems to make its point more clearly in a short story that the previous piece of fiction made in an entire novelet. Not much point in me talking about Karin Lowachee’s film review of Bird Box given that I’ve never seen the film and, as Cath would attest, I don’t go to see films. I did though like the S. Harris cartoon at the end of the review – not up to Gahan Wilson’s standard, but it would have been fine in any fanzine. Jerry Olton seems to have taken up Asimov’s role as F&SF’s Science writer and it’s interesting to note that, in this issue, he’s talking about orbits, much as Asimov was fifty years ago in the issue reviewed above. The F&SF competition is all well and good, but its deadlines have usually well and truly passed by the time I get to look at the issue. The competition for this issue, dated May June 2019 has a deadline of January 15th 2019. Time machine anyone? “Sternutative Sortilege” by Matthew Hughes is, I gather, one of several stories about the thief Raffalon. It’s an okay piece of D&D style fantasy with occasional glimmerings of humour. It features a quirky group of clerics, some eldritch magic and an assortment of ruffians who both help and hinder Raffalon’s attempts to escape the dungeon into which he has been inveigled. The writing is clear and competent but there’s nothing to make it stand out from other examples of the genre. “The Fourth Trimester Is the Strangest” by Rebecca Campbell could well have appeared in any literary magazine. It may, or may not, be about post-natal depression and delves into the strange semi-dreaming state that I believe some mothers enter after the birth of a child. It’s one upon which I don’t feel particularly qualified to comment. It’d be interesting to see how a woman who has experienced childbirth reacts to the story. (I’d show it to Cath, but she’s still employed in teaching and so has little time for reading fiction.) “Apocalypse Considered Through a Helix of Semiprecious Foods and Recipes” by Tobias S. Buckell is a set of vignettes, each depicting a possible future through the lens of the food being prepared. None of these pictures a future that I’d want to be a part of but each is vividly possible. This is the sort of future warning fiction that we all read so much of in the fifties and sixties. I thought a little of Bradbury’s “To the Chicago Abyss” as I read them. Food can be terribly evocative. The issue finishes with a brief essay on Carmichael Smith’s Atomsk, Carmichael Smith being another of Paul Linebarger’s pseudonyms. I can remember trying to read this, along with Ria and Carola, but always preferred Linebarger’s Cordwainer Smith stories. Okay. So that was a recent F&SF. Much like the older ones I’ve been going through, it is a mixture of very good, very disturbing, rather pedestrian and rather too clever for their own good stories. It has been interesting looking at what the contemporary magazine contains, but I can’t see myself ever renewing my subscription.

---oOo---

26 NOTES FROM THE SPECTACLE CASE

Well, I attended Continuum and must admit that I enjoyed the chance to catch up with people. Being well removed from the mainstream of fandom has its advantages too. I went along without feeling any obligation to actually do anything at the convention, apart from talking to old friends. I even attended some panels – fan history, but also one that was an “Ace Double” on human evolution and then on the historicity of Merlin.

I can’t say that it was the sort of social experience that I used to associate with conventions. I didn’t attend any room parties and spent limited amounts of time in the bar. That did include one rather strange experience – I was waiting to buy a drink at the bar and Tim Reddan was there. Having bought our drinks, we headed away in the direction of other fans, but Tim sat us down at a table with two young female fans and started talking to them. I felt decidedly uncomfortable but, fortunately, these two were biology students from Canberra and were happy to talk about beetle taxonomy and human evolution. (I was a little disappointed to find that the woman specialising in human evolution wasn’t fond of Richard Dawkins.) I finally found an excuse to disappear, but rather spoiled it by only getting as far as a table of people I knew. It was great to catch up with Cary Lenehan who I’ve got to know better through Facebook than I did when he was one of the pillars of Sydney gaming fandom. I’ve discovered several mutual acquaintances who are involved both in Scouting and the SCA,. It was nice to natter to Ann Poore. She had her harp with her for an open mic she was attending later in the evening but that was starting a little too late for me. We didn’t arrange any filking. I’m not even sure if filking still occurs at Australian conventions. I found myself sitting next to Janice Murray at one point and we did talk a little. Then there was time spent in the dealer’s room briefly catching up with Justin. Sadly the pre-convention lurgi had struck down people like Jo and later Carey Handfield and Julian Warner. I attended the Awards ceremony and was, yet again, reminded of how far I’d drifted from fandom. Roman and I kept looking at one another when the fan awards were announced as if to say “Do you know who the fuck that is?” Still it was enjoyable enough that I allowed Cath to sign me up for next year’s Continuum. And then I went back to Scouting. My Scouting commitment has changed in nature but not in extent. I’ve resigned from my role as a District Cub Scout Leader in order to concentrate on being a Group Leader for 6th Box Hill (Hellenic). This means I’m responsible for the management of the Group, rather than working directly with the youth members. My involvement with the Scout Heritage Centre is also taking up more time, both with assisting to manage aspects of the collection and conducting tours of the Museum. On one recent tour, I bumped into Sharon, Derek Screen’s wife. She and Derek are both involved in a Scout Group – Derek as committee and general helper and Sharon, who has given up Guides is training as a Scout Leader. Part of being a Scout Leader involves training. I have been involved in tutoring on face-to-face courses for Cub Scout Leaders, where we try to get the trainees to put into practice the concepts that they cover prior to attending face- to-face courses in their on-line modules. This has meant me doing all the modules myself. When I started my training fifteen years ago, all the courses were done face to face. The modules aren’t too bad and I’ve been assured that they are less annoying than some of the professional on-line training that people have been forced to do. They do though take up time that I should be using for ANZAPA contributions. At present, because my role involves looking after the Scout section in my Group, I’m working through the on-line Scout modules. I may go to the first of the face-to-face courses, as a trainee, but will give the second weekend – hiking skills – a miss. My knees aren’t really up for it. I feel a little guilty about that as a Cub Leader friend of mine – Pippa – did the whole Cub Scout training from her wheel chair. Admittedly that didn’t involve hiking, but it did involve a camp in tents!

But anyway, retirement sees me as busy as ever. Sitting down working on an ANZAPA contribution is nice and relaxing. Scouting gets me out and about and interacting with people face to face. It’s a good combination.

In line with people’s listing of their cultural exploits, I’ll add mine. Scouting has had Gang shows since Ralph Reader started them in London in 1934. Each state has its own Gang Show and I was lucky enough to be in the cast of the Adelaide Gang Show in 1966. Ian Gunn was involved with the Melbourne Gang Show. I now try to get to Melbourne Gang Show each year, along with local variants such as Whitehorse Showtime. The nature of the show has changed over time. It now has both Scouts and Guides in the cast. When I did the Adelaide Gang Show there were no girls in the cast. Boys played the female roles. I being fair and full of face was chosen to play 27 the role of an Indian maiden. There were also few indigenous Scouts and none that I can remember in the Gang Show and so I was blacked up to play an aboriginal in those less ideologically sound times. This year’s Gang Show, with its Circus Theme was quite stunning. The sets and lighting were far beyond what I was used to in days gone by in the Unley Town Hall and not only were there girls in the cast but some of the Rovers and Rangers were dressed in outfits that I suspect would have resulted in Baden Powell rethinking the old tenth Scout Law – A Scout is clean in thought, word and deed. It was an excellent show, written by members of the show and highlighting a wide range of talent in the Scouting community. And I will admit to a slight tearing up when they got to the traditional final song “Gee it’s a wonderful life”.

KNOT FUNNY

A fanzine produced specifically for ANZAPA by Marc Ortlieb, P.O. Box 215 Forest Hill 3131. Is Science Fiction Funny?

“I know we laugh at the troubles of others, provided those troubles are not too serious. Out of that observation I have reached a conclusion which may be of some comfort to those accused of “having no sense of humor.” These folks are charming, lovable, philanthropic people, and invariably I like them – as long as they keep out of the theatres where I am playing, which they usually do. If they get in by mistake, they leave early.

The reason they don’t laugh at most gags is that their first emotional reaction is to feel sorry for people instead of to laugh at them

I like, in an audience the fellow who roars continuously at the troubles of the character I am portraying on the stage, but he probably has a mean streak in him and, if I needed ten dollars, he’d be the last person I’d call upon. I’d go first to the old lady and old gentleman back in Row S who keep wondering what there is to laugh at.” “Anything For A Laugh” W.C. Fields September 1934

So what is funny? There’s the old joke about the cannibal tribe who ate all the members of a circus except the clowns, because the clowns tasted funny. That relies on the distinction between “funny ha ha” and “funny peculiar” and got me wondering about the etymology of the word “funny”. Needless to say I immediately reached for my standard reference Dr Google who passed me on to the Online Etymology Dictionary which provided the following:"diversion, amusement, mirthful sport," 1727, earlier "a cheat, trick" (c. 1700), from verb fun (1680s) "to cheat, hoax," which is of uncertain origin, probably a variant of Middle English fonnen "befool" (c. 1400; see fond). This drift in meaning reminded me of the way the word “nice” was derived from the Latin “nescius” which meant ignorant. But back to funny – there are several French terms that seem to translate to “funny ha ha” including “drôle”, “amusant” and “marrant”, the first two having been shanghaied into English for degrees of mirth. For “funny peculiar” the French use “bizarre” or “curieux” which, again, have been drawn into English as terms relating to peculiar, but each with its own specific connotations. Sf certainly has its share of peculiarities and you could probably encompass most of the genre in the definition of peculiar as per the Cambridge English Dictionary: 1. unusual and strange, sometimes in an unpleasant way: 2. belonging to, relating to, or found in only particular people or things. So I think I’ll avoid that aspect of funny and concentrate on science fiction of the “funny ha ha” type. So in what ways is science fiction funny? There is certainly humour in science fiction though, as Spider 28 Robinson once noted, humorous science fiction tends to get short shrift when awards are being considered. I suspect that this was, at least in part, why the Sydney Science Fiction Foundation created the Pat Terry Award for humour in sf. I’m certain that Jack Herman could enlighten us further on this. Spider himself has been responsible for several books of stories that can be considered funny and I love all of the puns and little in-jokes that can be found in his Callahan’s Bar and Lady Sally’s House stories. But, even in these, compassion comes to the fore – there are no stories where we tend to laugh at the troubles of others. This has been brought home to me through the Callahan’s Place Facebook page. Certainly people post funny stories here, but a lot of the content consists of people airing their sadness, in much the way that Spider chronicles in his Callahan stories.

“This sense of humour of mine isn’t funny at all” Kate Bush “Moments of Pleasure”

I have a sense of humour that probably puts me in the company of Fields’ fellow roaring continuously at the troubles of stage characters. This has, occasionally, got me into strife when I’ve been unable to pass up a straight line. Not being able to pass up a straight line has also meant missing opportunities, like the time, in my teacher’s college days when I was at a cast party for a drama club performance. The leading lady plunked herself into my lap and said, “You know I’ve screwed almost every man in this room and I’m looking for green fields. Are you green?” “No. I replied. I’m yellow.” A good line but I remained yellow, and unscrewed. So my sense of humour has been a handy defence mechanism but has led to all sorts of missed opportunities. It’s also influenced my taste in funny science fiction. It’s worth noting that very little funny sf makes me LoL. I must admit that even writers noted for their humour tend to get me thinking, more than laughing. Thus Harry Harrison’s work is generally considered to be funny sf, but that rests largely on his ability to parody major science fiction themes or particular novels. Bill the Galactic Hero manages to take the piss out of Heinlein’s Starship Troopers and Asimov’s Foundation series but, as any good parody does, it points out the inconsistencies in the originals. It doesn’t hurt to throw in a few down-home truths to anchor the parodies. Harrison points out that, while Asimov created his world-spanning city/planet of Trantor he didn’t really think of issues like how one disposes of the rubbish generated by an entire planet when one has covered all the landfill, or how one navigates around such a world. I’d hate to see Trantor’s equivalent of Melways… but does it give a good belly laugh? No. Similarly while so many fans can quote slabs from the Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, there aren’t really jokes in there, simply wry observations of science fiction tropes (I was going to say science fiction conventions, but that could lead to misinterpretations.) Adams’ humour is of a cerebral kind, where one’s immediate response is to think “Interesting point”, rather than to erupt with a fully fledged chortle. Even his brief descents into the lavatorial, such as with the name Slartibartfast don’t elicit the type of titter associated with more mainstream fart jokes. John Sladek’s parodies are far more pointed, notably his Three Laws or Robish, which are just the same as Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics, but with a different title. Again, no matter how silly Sladek makes the parodies, the only source of a giggle is in the names with which he invests his “writers”, a favourite being the afore-mentioned Iclick as-i-move. (Hitler I.E. Bonner is a trifle less subtle.) Science fiction has much in common with a good piece of stand-up comedy. Much as science fiction regularly holds modern society up to the magnifying glass, so does good observational comedy. Spider Robinson can use his Callahan’s stories to point out failings in our society, while, at the same time creating characters to whom the reader can easily relate, and with whom the reader can sympathise. And, speaking of stand-up comedy, Milton Jones, who regularly appears on Mock The Week, specialises in the type of humour that relies on word play. I loved his line “This meal is so simple that anyone can cook it. You can’t Beatrice. Oh. Sorry. You can’t beat rice.” Such word play is key to stories such as Arthur C. Clarke’s “Neutron Star” and Adventures in Time and Space With Ferdinand Feghoot. Here we are dealing with the twisting of language and the incongruous When have I laughed out loud at science fiction. It’s usually at the lamest of jokes. James Bibby published a number of stories about a character called Ronan the Barbarian which interspersed a parody of bad sword and sorcery sagas with some truly atrocious punch-lines, some of which would bring a smile to the lips of any lover of My Word or the aforementioned Ferdinand Feghoot. One particularly painful sequence culminated in the line “There are few more terrifying sounds than that of Orc Astral Man Hoovers in the Dark.” Bibby is also responsible for a sequence in a pub game of spear-throwing where a zombie is heckling the heroine who skewers it and the double forty on the target, leading the umpire announcing a score of “One undead and eighty.” Some of the humour in sf is self-referential. Larry Niven & David Gerrold managed to take the fannish practice of Tuckerisation to new heights in The Flying Sorcerers where the names of all the gods of the natives of the planet where the Earthman – referred to by said natives as “Purple” – is stranded are derived from the names of science fiction personalities. When the expression “May Elcin strike you on the knee caps.” is used those of us in the know can demonstrate our superiority by laughing because we know that Elcin is a Tuckerisation of Harlan Ellison and Ellison’s short stature and short temper were part of common fannish folklore. Nowhere was that better illustrated than when all six foot ten of Andrew Brown appeared in a masquerade as “Harlan Ellison as he sees himself.” Chris Priest, who was one of the judges, noted “That’s the worst Harlan Ellison impersonation I’ve ever seen.” Andrew replied “How would you like seven Hugoes stuffed up your arse.” Without a second’s pause, Priest replied “That’s the best Harlan Ellison impersonation I’ve ever seen.” Humour is often based on discomfort, as Heinlein noted, not that originally, in Stranger In A Strange Land. In trying to explain his sudden understanding of humour to Gillian, Valentine Michael Smith forces her to realise that jokes usually depend on misfortune occurring to others. To the observer, someone slipping on a banana skin is funny; to the person slipping it isn’t. And to a compassionate observer, it isn’t funny either and so we return to Fields’ folk who never 29 laugh at him. Yet a good physical comedian can make what should elicit compassion into something that elicits laughter, through exaggeration, facial expressions or simply through the absurdity of the way the character slips. It must also be noted that the humour of discomfort is assisted if the person who is suffering the discomfort is pompous or unlikable – vis humour about politicians or the clergy. This style of humour is not so obvious in science fiction, though it does occasionally appear in sf with its roots in the military. Eric Frank Russell’s story “Alamagoosa”, apart from playing with words, relies on barracks humour – the eternal quest of the lower echelons in the military to undermine authority and, in the case of this story, how a wonderful plan can come unstuck. In the case of parody, the object of the discomfort is the author of the work being parodied, though I doubt that either Heinlein or Asimov lost much sleep over Harrison’s parodies. Indeed, in the more mundane world, I believe that musicians take great pride in being selected for attention by Weird Al Yankovic. Perhaps science fiction authors are similarly thick skinned. (But I doubt it.) The question persists. Is it possible to laugh at “funny” science fiction? The more I think about it, the less certain I become. Perhaps it’s difficult to create humorous incongruity in a genre for which incongruity is the order of the day. Perhaps science fiction readers are more likely to be more compassionate than the general populace. Maybe science fiction simply isn’t funny.

KNOT THE STORY

One of the sessions I regularly run during Cub Scout Leader Training courses is on yarns and on how to use them during Cub Scouts programs. Now, the fact that we call them yarns does tie in with my knotting themes – remembering well the Three Fates: Clotho who spun out the thread of life, Lachesis who measured out the span of the thread of life and Atropos who finally cut the thread of life. They spun the yarns that make up our lives and we spin smaller yarns to make sense of things. (I have some difficulty making sense of coincidences. The Greek term for fate is moira, a fact that Jack Herman would appreciate, given that it was his fate to be an inhabitant of the famous Sydney Slanshack at Moira Crescent.) In Cub Scouts, we often use yarns to help instruct. Sometimes these are very short yarns, such as “right over left and left over right” for a reef knot (also known as a square knot.) Sometimes the yarns are more involved. There is a variant of the reef knot in which the loose ends are on opposite sides of the knot. We call that a thief knot and the story that goes with that has been attributed to Baden-Powell, though less biased yarn spinners will tell it as a story of sailors. You may be aware that a reef knot is not a good knot for joining two ropes. Strictly speaking you join two ropes together with a bend, not a knot, the sheet bend being the best known of the bends. Reef knots are great for tying slings, where you want a nice flat knot where the sling rests against the neck, for tying string to secure a parcel or, in the case of sailors of old, for tying the neck of their sea-sack or duffel bag. So the yarn gets told that Baden-Powell was sure that someone was stealing from his stores and then retying the bags to make it appear that nothing had been interfered with. To prove that someone was interfering with the stores, he tied them with thief knots and so, if he returned to find them tied with reef knots, he was sure that there was mischief afoot. Such stories engage the interest of the Cub Scouts and they spent time trying to tie both the reef knot and the thief knot. We call it Learning By Doing and it’s a key plank in the Scout Educational method. But the other use for a yarn is to directly instruct and the most common yarn for that is the one that explains how to do a bowline. A bowline is a good knot for creating a loop in the end of a rope. It’s secure and it’s quite possible to tie with one hand as several Rover Scouts have demonstrated to me. (I must get the hang of that one of these days.) But the traditional bowline comes with a yarn in which you create a loop, the running end is called the rabbit. The rabbit comes up through the hole, goes around the back of the tree and then goes back down the hole. A similar story, this time involving Nag the cobra, from Kipling’s story “Rikki-tikki-tavi” can be told to explain how to tie a sheet bend and Wikipedia notes The common bowline shares some structural similarity with the sheet bend. Virtually all end-to-end joining knots (i.e., bends) have a corresponding eye knot. As I mentioned in Nothing Is But What Is Knot, my favourite knot story isn’t strictly about a knot, it’s about a splice. Captain Chandler kindly explained to me the cunt splice in reply to my accusation that he was in the habit of using rough sailor type language. And I’ve since discovered that splicing rope is a very peaceful way of passing the time when one gets fed up of correcting other people’s grammar and spelling on Facebook. I’d become something of a dab hand at back splicing, now that I’ve mastered the crown knot that starts it off and so I’m almost ready to experiment with an eye splice and then may aspire to Captain Chandler’s cunt splice. The secret to many knots is getting them started properly – the double stranded turk’s head, for instance, is very easy to do once it’s started and I have this sneaking suspicion that writing fiction is very similar. Thus it is with a back splice. Once you’ve fixed the crown knot in place you simply weave the three strands through the rope, leading to an end that isn’t a frayed. Back splices are far better for protecting the ends of rope than is basic whipping. I haven’t dared the more complicated sailmaker’s 30 whipping. For a start it requires a proper sail-maker’s needle and one of those leather hand protectors. Of course most Scout Leaders tend to adopt Alexander the Great’s approach to insoluble knots – cutting them off saves a great deal of time. Having had to disassemble a construction of spars where the lashings have become wet and the rope has swelled has resulted in a great deal of swearing and skinned knuckles – from the spars, not from hitting the Scouts who had assembled the construction. But even such constructions connect to tales – remembering the best constructions you’ve ever done, like the tower we constructed for our Troop at the 1966 Corroboree in Adelaide, or the ballistae we made for launching water bombs at Gilwell Park. That one almost led to disaster. One member of our patrol had the brilliant idea of lashing an iron frying pan to the end of the main spar so that we could load the pan with water bombs. Sadly the lashing on the pan wasn’t as tight as it might have been and, instead of launching some fairly harmless water bombs at out opposite patrol, we sent a lump of iron frying pan. It was a good thing that our aim was as bad as our lashing. But it’s here that my yarn unravels – I’m a frayed that I can’t find an appropriate stopper knot to bind these threads together. So I’ll just have to bight the bullet and come to the bitter end.

THE MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION September 1969 Cover price 60c Editor Edward L. Ferman

Contents: Novelets: “Bonita Egg”, Julian F. Grow; “The Patient”, Hoke Norris; “J-Line to Nowhere”, Zenna Henderson Short Stories: “Sweet Helen”, Charles W. Runyon; “Muse”, Dean R. Koontz; “The Screwiest Job in the World”, Bill Pronzini Article: “The Man Who Massed the Earth” Isaac Asimov Cartoon: Gahan Wilson. Books: Joanna Russ Cover: Chesley Bonestall

“Sweet Helen”, Charles W. Runyon: The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction notes that Runyon dealt with sex involving aliens and this is no exception. It is an interesting twist on the predatory female and some speculations on alien reproductive strategies. I suspect male science fiction writers in the 60s did tend to find the female of the species somewhat daunting and turned to such things as the black widow spider for their inspiration. This story has more to do with the loss of identity, with a touch of the Lovecraftian sea monster.

Joanna Russ’s book reviews were, needless to say, interesting, but she made a mistake of slightly less magnitude than Robert Silverberg claiming that James Tiptree Jr’s writing had a robust masculing quality. In reviewing John Boyd’s The Last Starship from Earth, she said “I would guess from much in the book that the author is a very, very young man, …” Of course Russ did not have the benefit of Google, where I discovered that John Boyd was actually Boyd Bradfield Upchurch and was 50 at the time this review was published.

Gahan Wilson’s cartoon deals with the fate of a sandwich board man whose job title becomes just a trifle too literal.

“Bonita Egg”, Julian F. Grow: F&SF had a tradition of setting science fiction stories in the American West. The earlier stories in Zenna Henderson’s The People series were typical of this. “Bonita Egg” is so own-home folksie that it hurts. However, the style grows on you. This is a Doctor Hiram Pertwee story, peppered with such lines as “Seems Big Tillie’d broken out with a boil on what one of them delicately called her hindquarters,…” It mixes up Indian Americans, with alien visitors, a pretty city-raised young native girl and a dithering U.S. cavalry officer, Lieutenant Winfield Scott Dinwiddie who would not have seemed out of place in “F Troop”. Human technology, in the form of the Henry rifle, proves too strong for the alien technology and the beautiful native girl falls in love with the grizzled old Doctor. By about the middle of the story I stopped letting the folk idiom bother me. A cute story.

“Muse”, Dean R. Koontz: Before he became known as a master of horror, Dean Koontz produced some interesting science fiction. This one deals with prejudice and is the flip side to Robert Heinlein’s The Puppet Masters. The opening line could quite easily wind up in Dave Langford’s “Thog’s Masterclass” – “Her hair tumbled over her breasts like burned butter,…” The story looks at how prejudice can tear families apart and how such judgements can hurt. Nothing much new, but covered in a manner that makes sense to science fiction fans.

“The Patient”, Hoke Norris: A mainstream writer and editor with only two science fiction stories to his name. This story looks at advances in medical science, about a year before Heinlein examined the sexual implications of brain transplants in I Will Fear No Evil. As in Heinlein’s story, the transplanted brain finds itself confused by its body’s demands though, thankfully, there are no conversations between the brain and the previous inhabitant of the body. Then there are the 31 issues associated with the family of the body donor. This is in the realm of stories that deal with issues just around the corner, though it doesn’t look as though brain transplants are likely to occur, given the current emphasis on medical ethics.

“The Screwiest Job in the World”, Bill Pronzini: Pronzini appears to have been a regular collaborator with Barry N. Maltzberg. He’s usually a writer of detective stories, which shows in this story – the protagonist is similar to the standard hard-boiled detective, except that his job is to locate freaks for a millionaire with a penchant for collecting such oddities. This particular assignment is to check the bone fides of a talking bear, a trip that takes him to a fur- trapper’s cabin in the Yukon. This would have made a great starting point for a series of such stories, but I can’t find any follow-ups. Needless to say, the talking bear is not quite what he seems.

“The Man Who Massed the Earth” Isaac Asimov: A concise summary of the difference between mass and weight, which also looks at the concept of force and which plays around with Newton’s gravity formulae in order to explain how the mass of the Earth was calculated.

“J-Line to Nowhere”, Zenna Henderson: I was very fond of Henderson’s stories about The People, even though they tended to be rather twee, but this one is, to my mind, one of her weakest stories. It’s set in a Trantor-like environment, where people live in totally artificial surroundings, with no trace of nature. In a way, it’s the world of Silent Running and seems to pay clumsy homage to the back-to-nature movement espoused by the hippies who, by 1969, were becoming a spent force. The use of a teenaged girl as the narrator/protagonist makes it more difficult to take seriously. Not one that I enjoyed re-reading.

One of this issues’ Personal ads amused me. Draft Card, Karate & Press $1.00 Identification – Box 25 Brooklyn N.Y. 11204. I guess it was still well and truly the time of the Vietnam War (my number wouldn’t be pulled out of the barrel until the following year. WHAT’S DONE IS DONE AND CAN KNOT BE UNDONE

A fanzine produced specifically for ANZAPA by Marc Ortlieb, P.O. Box 215 Forest Hill 3131.

WATT’S DONNE IS DONNE AND CANNOT BE UNDONNE?

One of the highlights of my discovery that I was as much a humanities student as a science student was moving from Science at Adelaide University to a Diploma of Teaching at Adelaide Teacher’s College where the excellent English lecturers allowed me to discover poetry and drama in a way that I hadn’t managed to do at school. The key player in this was a delightful lady called Marion Howes who tutored us in English while, at the same time, completing her own Diploma of Teaching. Thus she was able to lecture us in the Academic studies while joining us as a classmate in education theory and practice. Marion even did teaching rounds with us at Croydon High School, a less than salubrious school in Adelaide’s west. One of her supervising teachers was rather scathing of her teaching until discovering that Marion lectured at ATC, after which said teacher was far more circumspect when commenting on lesson plans. Mind you, Marion was quite capable of stirring, as she did by waltzing down the school corridor – literally waltzing – with one of our other female student teachers. Marion also joined the cast of one of our musical productions as a chorus member. I was running the lighting for that show and Julie, one of my follow-spot operators, who was a couple of years below me, was bribed by Marion, who promised her a boosted grade on the condition that Julie provided her with her own personal moment in the spotlight. The first I knew of this was when Julie’s spot suddenly narrowed to catch Marion in the back row of the chorus. But Marion and her fellow lecturers encouraged us to have fun with literature and appealed to our less-than- mature minds by pointing out the vulgarity in William Blake and John Donne. Thus they read us “When Klopstock England Defied” by Blake with its delightful couplets

Blake was giving his body ease, At Lambeth beneath the poplar trees. and If Blake could do this when he rose up from shite, What might he not do if he sat down to write?

32 They also introduced me to more modern poets, including the Blake inspired “Children of Albion” poets who included Pete Brown who became a lyricist for Jack Bruce and Cream. Some of that I really liked – it seemed far more liberated than the narrow confines of Wordsworth and Hopkins. But the poet who really hit home was Sylvia Plath. I found in her poetry a power that was missing from others. The biographical aspect was interesting, but what really resonated with me was the way she could weave such controlled anger into her writing. “Daddy, daddy, you bastard. I’m through” I wouldn’t really rediscover that power until I heard Patti Smith spitting out “Baby was a black sheep. Baby was a whore. Baby got big but she’s gonna get bigger.” I also loved the way Plath riffed on words much as Eric Clapton would riff on chords.

And the fish, the fish— Christ! they are panes of ice, A vice of knives, A piranha Religion, drinking Its first communion out of my live toes.

Plath was accused of allowing her poetry to ride on events such as the Holocaust and Hiroshima and she certainly did get mileage out of that in “Daddy” and “Lady Lazarus” but she also played with hospital and beehive imagery. The bee references were personal, given that her father was an entomologist specialising in bees. The hospital references drew on her time in mental care and her hospital experiences linked to childbirth. Her poem “Cut” is a great riff, swinging from images linking the colonisation of America to the War of Independence to the racism in Alabama. In another poem, “Morning Song” she also deals with motherhood with incredible power:

I’m no more your mother Than the cloud that distills a mirror to reflect its own slow Effacement at the wind’s hand.

Thanks to the great mob of English tutors at Adelaide Teachers’ College I got to deliver my “Sylvia Plath Memorial Gas Oven” lecture to several Year 12 English Literature classes – the Lit teacher at John Gardiner High School was not fond of Plath’s poetry and so, whenever Plath appeared on the syllabus I’d be invited in. It always amused those students who thought of me as a junior science teacher to hear me spouting poetry. But it wasn’t just modern poets that we read. Marion and her merry men were quite happy to introduce us to the early works of John Donne, once more taking great delight in reading us the naughty bits: …and though Ill spirits walk in white, we easily know, By this these Angels from an evil sprite, Those set our hairs, but these our flesh upright. Licence my roving hands, and let them go, Before, behind, between, above, below. I grew quite fond of metaphysical conceits, such as the way Donne combined the flea with a marriage bed. This flea is you and I, and this Our marriage bed, and marriage temple is;

In a way this prepared me for the lyrics of Joni Mitchell and the way that she could bring disparate concepts together: But even on the scuffle The cleaner's press was in my jeans And any eye for detail Caught a little lace along the seams Many English teachers were disparaging of song lyrics but I always kept in mind the fact that words are words and the fact that people like Dylan, Mitchell and Melanie had music to go with their words did not detract from their message. Indeed Melanie’s lines And I’ll weave my reflection In the tears that I cry were not that far from Plath’s “Morning Song” quoted above. Many of my friends at the time were more involved in the music than the words and so their music gods were Clapton, Hendrix or the members of Pink Floyd. While I did enjoy some of that music, a well turned lyric was more likely to attract my attention. David Crosby, of the Byrds and Crosby, Stills and Nash, said words to the effect that the California musicians were impressed by their more poetic compatriots 33 and that Joni Mitchell was easily the best of their poets. I guess it’s no surprise that Robert Zimmerman took on the name Dylan, from Dylan Thomas and that Thomas Miller became Tom Verlaine. (As an aside, Verlaine’s Anthology album was called The Miller’s Tale – so Chaucer gets a look in as well.) I wasn’t likely to disagree with Crosby’s assertions and so I found musicians who were wordsmiths, like Jackson Browne who led me to Warren Zevon. Sure, some of the lyrics were trite, but Sturgeon’s Law applies to songs as much as it does to science fiction. Naturally, everyone was looking for the next Bob Dylan and my favourite among those saddled with that soubriquet was Patti Smith. Smith is one singer/writer for whom the words are of supreme importance and she’s thoroughly aware of how to use words to shock her audience. Where Blake is shitting in Lambeth, Patti is “Pissing in a river/Watching it rise.” And she gets mileage out of her use of the word “nigger” in her song “Rock & Roll Nigger.” Despite all the fuss over Justin Trudeau’s blackface photographs, Smith does not seem to have been called to account for that song. Smith acknowledges her debt to Rimbaud and Blake. One of the songs from the Trampin’ album is “My Blakean Year”. While I’m fairly au fait with William Blake, I’ve never really attacked the work of Rimbaud. I suppose I should, especially given the connection between Rimbaud and the Cordwainer Smith character Artyr Rambo from “Drunkboat”. (Having since found a copy of Rimbaud’s “The Drunken Boat”, I realise that I have some work to do. Smith seems to have used a different translation to the one I found, but it’s an incredibly compelling poem and one that I’m going to have to re-read a number of times, and then re-read “Drunkboat” to really come to grips with the connection. I can understand why Smith chose it in attempting to convey the experience of a Space beyond Space.) A couple of my other favourite lyricists tend more to narrative poems than the denser poems of the “literary” poets. Thus Richard Thompson tells great stories in his song lyrics – “Beeswing” and “1952 Vincent Black Lightning” are good examples of this particular genre, the former dealing with the love for a woman who can’t be pinned down in a relationship and the latter being the story of a petty criminal and his motorcycle. Even so, the economy of language is evident. “The last I heard she was sleeping rough back on the Derby beat/Whitehorse in her hip pocket and a wolfhound at her feet.” or “When she came to the hospital there wasn’t much left/He was running out of road. He was running out of breath.” Similarly Warren Zevon tells stories such as “Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner” – “Patty Hearst heard the burst of Roland’s Thompson gun and bought it.” Still, narrative poetry is a valid poetical form. Just ask my mates Homer and Virgil, to say nothing of John Milton. But I will say something about Milton. Thanks to Adelaide Teacher’s College, I read Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained, both of which gave me a better handle on Christian mythology, but I preferred his sonnets. Looking back on them now, I think I’ll re-evaluate that. The sonnets now seem far too religious, whereas the Paradise poems have more fun with the character of Satan. The one sonnet that I used to like “On His Blindness” seems far too ready to kowtow to the will of God. “On His Deceased Wife” is a far more interesting poem dealing with grief, albeit with religious undertones. All that leaves is to wonder what, apart from the pun in the title, Watt has to do with all these poetical reminiscences? Nothing really, but, in attempting to justify the pun, I did a little research on James Watt and, as far as I can work out, he invented an early version of the office copier, without which such organisations as ANZAPA may never have come to pass. That fount of all knowledge, Wikipedia, puts it like this: Portable Copying Machine by James Watt & Co. Circa 1795

Before 1780 there was no good method for making copies of letters or drawings. The only method sometimes used was a mechanical one using linked multiple pens. Watt at first experimented with improving this method, but soon gave up on this approach because it was so cumbersome. He instead decided to try to physically transfer some ink from the front of the original to the back of another sheet, moistened with a solvent, and pressed to the original. The second sheet had to be thin, so that the ink could be seen through it when the copy was held up to the light, thus reproducing the original exactly. Watt started to develop the process in 1779, and made many experiments to formulate the ink, select the thin paper, to devise a method for wetting the special thin paper, and to make a press suitable for applying the correct pressure to effect the transfer. All of these required much experimentation, but he soon had enough success to patent the process a year later. Watt formed another partnership with Boulton (who provided financing) and James Keir (to manage the business) in a firm called James Watt and Co. The perfection of the invention required much more development work before it could be routinely used by others, but this was carried out over the next few years. Boulton and Watt gave up their shares to their sons in 1794. It became a commercial success and was widely used in offices even into the twentieth century.

So, when I have Donne, I have not done but I suspect this verse has reached its end. Not a very satisfying conclusion but I’ll fall back on another 34 favourite poet Terrence Alan Milligan, whose sketches could end with “What are we going to do now?”

Sad to note that Alex Ozanne mentioned the recent death of his father Ken. Ken was a major player in N.S.W. and Australian fandom. I always remember his good humour. Ken wasn’t an ANZAPA member but franked a couple of things through.

THE MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION October 1969 Cover Price 60c Editor Edward L. Ferman

Contents

Novelets: “Feminine Intuition”, Isaac Asimov; “The Soft Predicament”, Brian W. Aldiss; “The Electric Ant”, Philip K. Dick.

Short Stories: “Come to Me Not in Winter's White”, Harlan Ellison and Roger Zelazny ; “The Movie People”, Robert Bloch; “A Final Sceptre, a Lasting Crown”, Ray Bradbury; “The Man Who Learned Loving”, Theodore Sturgeon; “Get a Horse!”, Larry Niven

Article: “Worlds in Confusion”, Isaac Asimov; Books: Gahan Wilson

Cartoon: Gahan Wilson; Cover: Ronald Wolotsky; Inside Cover: Chesley Bonestell

The anniversary issues were always interesting in terms of content. This one managed to collect a number of my favourite writers from the time. It’s going to be interesting seeing how their stories stack up to my memories.

“Feminine Intuition”, Isaac Asimov: This is, unfortunately, Asimov by numbers. It is a Susan Calvin robot story without the robot being at the center of the story. While the interactions between the human workers at United States Robots are fine, the robot itself plays a very minor role in the plot. As are many of Asimov’s stories, this one has elements of the detective story, but the denouement is incredibly trite and does not merit the build up. Asimov takes a potentially interesting premise – a robot with the ability to free associate – but makes no effective use of it, apart from musing on the effect a robot with a contralto voice would have on male humans. Okay. Time 1, Memory 0.

“Come to Me Not in Winter's White” Harlan Ellison and Roger Zelazny. A delightful combination of two talents. I can’t say I know either author’s work well enough to dissect out what is Ellison and what is Zelazny though, to my untrained eye, it seems more Ellison than Zelazny. In style it feels a little like Spinrad’s “Carcinoma Angels” which Ellison included in Dangerous Visions. It has that strange third person/second person way of telling the story of a scientist trying to save his wife from a terrible disease – it almost seems inspired by Stephen Hawking’s fight with MND.

“The Movie People” by Robert Bloch plays to Bloch’s strengths. It’s a ghost story of a kind, mixed in with the movie business, with which Bloch was intimately familiar. It’s a bitter-sweet feel good story which takes a concept and builds a story that makes you care for the protagonists. Bloch plays the role of narrator. “A Final Sceptre, a Lasting Crown” by Ray Bradbury is a strange piece of Bradbury nostalgia. Rather than looking at the lost Golden Age of America, Bradbury takes us to the last man living in Great Britain after everyone else has migrated South to the warmer climes of California, Sicily or Australia. Much as his protagonist in “To The Chicago Abyss” reminded others of newly opened coffee jars, or the living books in Fahrenheit 451 reeled off the words of lost literature King Harry IX takes us to Churchill’s funeral, the blitz and woad. I wonder if Kate Bush ever read the story. Her song “Lionheart” with lines such as “Peter Pan steals the kids in Kensington Park” conjures up very similar images.

Isaac Asimov’s science essay, “Worlds in Confusion”, introduced me to the strange celestial mechanics invented by Immanuel Velikovsky to try and provide some “science” to justify events in the Bible, such as the Sun standing still in the sky and the walls of Jericho falling down. Sigh. In these days of strange pseudoscientific claims, we need Asimov more than either to provide back up for Tyson, Cox, Randi, Dawkins et al. (It’s no coincidence that the Amazing Randi was a friend of Asimov’s.)

“The Soft Predicament” by Brian Aldiss seems to try to fit too much into a novelet. I don’t know Aldiss’s other work well enough to say whether or not this did eventually become part of a later piece of his writing. I’m sure Bruce Gillespie would know. The story mixes the discovery of colossal life forms in Jupiter’s atmosphere with an Earth split into warring First World and Third World blocs and some sort of psychic investigations into the collective unconscious plus family interactions that at times seem reminiscent of Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End. Although one gets 35 background on the protagonist and starts to understand his ambivalence towards the world conflict, his sudden mood swings do not seem to make much sense. There is a reflection of the peace movement of the times, with the young pushing the boundaries. Let’s face it, 1969 was the year of Woodstock. There are even places where the war experiences that resulted in the Horatio Stubbs stories A Soldier Erect and A Rude Awakening make an appearance. The writing is smooth and polished but the novelet just doesn’t seem to go anywhere.

Theodore Sturgeon’s “The Man Who Learned Loving” is a great story about a thinking hippy who realizes that he has to work within the system in order to change the system. It is a mark of the more optimistic time that the change is successful. Crosby, Stills and Nash sang “Almost Cut My Hair”. Sturgeon’s protagonist, Mensch, cuts his hair in order to get his invention – a literal perpetual motion machine – to the public without the suits screwing everything up. The sad thing is that his hippy girlfriend, Flora, cannot understand this. Sturgeon is using his intelligence and pointing out that the hippy dream needs some common sense, a view that would have been against the zeitgeist of the fading Summer of Love. I did note a slight dig at L. Ron Hubbard in there too: “I can name three kinds on mental therapy that could have changed the face of the earth, and in each one the men who found it went on to insane Institutes and so- called religions and made fools of themselves – dangerous fools at that – and now no one will look at their really great early discoveries” (Wikipedia notes Sturgeon’s claim that he was in the room when Hubbard expressed the view that the real way to make money was to start a religion.) ((Coincidentally, while channel surfing the other day I chanced upon one of the Sturgeon penned episodes of Star Trek – “Shore Leave”.))

Baird Searles column on books concentrates on horror and fantasy. I will admit that the only authors whose names I recognised were Peter S. Beagle and Richard Matheson but, since I haven’t read the books reviewed, I can’t really comment, apart to note that the books were priced at sixty or ninety five cents each. Those were the days eh?

Philip K. Dick’s “The Electric Ant” is another of Dick’s variants of the Red King’s Dream. It centres on Garson Poole, who believed himself to be the human owner of a technology company but who, having suffered an accident, discovers that he is an electric ant – an android designed to behave as a human being. Given that this story appeared just a year after the publication of Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep, the connections are clear. Dick is doing what all the best musicians do – improvising around his central themes. This one takes things a little further as Poole discovers the internal program that connects him to reality and he tries editing it. Given the widespread use of psychedelics at this time, it’s not a surprising development. According to an interview given to Vertex Magazine4, Dick hadn’t tried LSD when he wrote The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch but he did subsequently. Whether that was before writing “The Electric Ant” isn’t made clear but, in that interview he does say “So if that [The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritc], which is my major novel of a hallucinogenic kind, came without my ever having taken LSD, then I would say even my work following LSD which had hallucinations in it could easily have been written without taking acid. “ He also adds “I did one page once while on an acid trip, but it was in Latin. Whole damn thing was in Latin and a little tiny bit in Sanskrit, and there’s not much market for that. The page does not fall in with my published work. “

The final story in this edition, “Get a Horse!” by Larry Niven is a cute mixture of time travel, alternate realities and mythology. Time agent Hanville Svetz is sent into the past to obtain a horse for the terribly in-bred and developmentally challenged Secretary General of the World. Svetz accidentally obtains a horse of a different colour, a unicorn – the Secretary General’s picture books had inadvertently not included a large and very dangerous horn in their illustration of a horse – allowing Niven to note that only one person in the time travel establishment can approach the “horse”: “All of a sudden it went completely tame, walked up to that frigid bitch Zeera and let her lead it away.” The throw away line at the end of the story concerns Svetz’s next mission – to collect a Gila Monster: “The thing he brought back was thirty feet long, had vestigial bat-like wings, breathed fire, and didn’t look very much like the illustration; but it was as close as anything he’d found.”

My favourite small ad from this issue runs as follows “Excite your friends – be the life of the party. Wear panties with hair. Give size, also color hair desired $2.95 per pair. 4 pairs $10.00. Super Shaggy, Fagin Panties. Hilarious, and rolls them on the floor as a party gift, it’s the conversation piece of he year. $10.00 per pair, no refunds, patent pending. Weaver, 6019 Lemon Hill Avenue, Sacramento, California 95824.”

LEWIS CARROLL AND THE JOY OF PHOTOGRAPHY

Among The Reverend Charles Dodgson’s many claims to fame is that he was a pioneer in the area of photography. This has led to some ammunition for the claims that he was a paedophile, given that his favourite subjects for photographs, apart from famous people such as Alfred Lord Tennyson, were young girls, including naked young girls. While I’m happy to let the Freudians pursue claims that his repressed paedophilia

4 Vertex, Vol. 1, no. 6, February 1974. 36 fuelled much of his work, what I have read of Dodgson’s life would suggest that, though he may have had such urges, he didn’t act on them. Thus I’m capable of enjoying his writing without having to browbeat myself over whether or not I should enjoy the writing of a paedophile. (This seems to have gained some currency following the recent kerfuffle over the naming of the John W. Campbell Junior Award, the Clarke Award and the Tiptree Prize.) Like any good writer, Dodgson used his experiences to fuel his writing. And so we come to another of his lesser known works, “Hiawatha’s Photographing”, based on Henry Wadworth Longfellow’s epic poem “The Song of Hiawatha”. The basic rhythm is simple enough, trochaic tetrameter and there is no particular rhyme scheme, apart from the occasional repetition of key phrases. The story is also simple and is one to which many a professional photographer might relate. It deals with the taking of a series of family portraits in the days when cameras were large solid objects, made or rosewood and when you couldn’t simply take a few hundred jpeg images for later perusal. Carroll is self-deprecating in his introduction to the poem: In an age of imitation, I can claim no special merit for this slight attempt at doing what is known to be so easy. Any fairly practised writer, with the slightest ear for rhythm, could compose, for hours together, in the easy running metre of “The Song of Hiawatha”. Having, then, distinctly stated that I challenge no attention in the following little poem to its merely verbal jingle, I must beg the candid reader to confine his criticism to its treatment of the subject. That said, I will acquiesce to his request and look at the poem’s subject, rather than its structural details. The poem starts by explaining how the camera was put together: From his shoulder Hiawatha Took the camera of rosewood, Made of sliding, folding rosewood; Neatly put it all together. … Till it looked all squares and oblongs, Like a complicated figure In the Second Book of Euclid Dodgson just can’t seem to escape his mathematical background. Neither can he escape his tendency to poke fun at John Ruskin. This I noted in my previous article on the poem Phantasmagoria ’Twas fashioned by an architect Who pinned his faith on Ruskin!”

This could be a wry dig at Ruskin who was, it appears, just as enamored of young Alice Liddell as was Dodgson himself (and with equal lack of success with Dean & Mrs Liddell’s approval)

“Her [Alice Liddell’s] post-Wonderland career was as unfulfilled as Dodgson’s. She continued to inspire hopeless romance. John Ruskin had a dalliance with her that was interrupted by her parents. In “Hiawatha’s Photographing” the reference is brought in when describing the posing of the eldest son of the family: He had learnt it all from Ruskin (Author of 'The Stones of Venice,' 'Seven Lamps of Architecture,' 'Modern Painters,' and some others); And perhaps he had not fully Understood his author's meaning; This forms part of the main theme of the poem, which is that the subjects of a photograph are the worst judges of what makes a good photograph. The father is portrayed as a stern authoritarian, whose photograph must include elements of classical art: a stone pillar in the background, a scroll in the hand, the other hand in the jacket, Napoleon- like, and a pensive look. The mother is decked out in finery to outrival an empress with a bouquet “Rather larger than a cabbage” and chatters through the whole proceedings while worrying about her profile. The eldest son, as noted, goes for the pretentious look, while the daughters go for their supposed beauty: Only asked if he would take her With her look of 'passive beauty-' Her idea of passive beauty Was a squinting of the left-eye, Was a drooping of the right-eye, Was a smile that went up Sideways To the corner of the nostrils. The youngest son receives all the scorn that Dodgson habitually doled out to young boys – vis the baby who turned into a pig in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland: And, so awful was the picture, In comparison the others Seemed, to one's bewildered fancy, To have partially succeeded. But all of the pictures are seen to have failed completely, except for the final family group photograph where the photographer: Did at last obtain a picture 37 Where the faces all succeeded: Each came out a perfect likeness. And every one of the sitters unrestrainedly abuses it, at which point the photographer packs up his materials and rapidly departs. Interesting to note though that this suggests that he developed the photographs on the spot in order that the family could thus react. Three verses added to the poem later, but not appearing in all compendiums of Carroll’s verses, detailing the process, can perhaps shed some light on the processes used. Secondly, my Hiawatha Made with cunning hand a mixture Of the acid pyrro-gallic, And of glacial-acetic, And of alcohol and water This developed all the picture.

Not exactly one of Carroll’s better efforts, but rather poignant, especially when one looks at the photographer’s departure: But my Hiawatha's patience, His politeness and his patience, Unaccountably had vanished, And he left that happy party. Much as the Baker disappeared softly and suddenly at the end of The Hunting of the Snark, so goes the photographer perhaps echoing the way that Dodgson was no longer permitted to photograph his Alice, or the way in which Dodgson managed to offend and thus be cut from Alfred Lord Tennyson’s circle. Dodgson gave up photography in 1880 either through a dislike for new photographic techniques or, it has been suggested, because of guilt or concern over his photographs of naked girls. What is known is that he destroyed, or ordered to be destroyed, both prints and negatives of these photos. So, as with the pictures in the poem, my picture of Charles Dodgson fails completely. I certainly have no intention of disliking his work but I wonder whether or not I should champion it.

ARTWORK

Bill Rotsler pp 1, 25 John Packer pp 6 & 10 Ian Gunn pp 27, 28 ATom p38

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