THE METAPHYSICAL REVIEW No
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THE METAPHYSICAL REVIEW No. 5/6 Oct. ’85 I MUST BE TALKING TO MY FRIENDS - Nobody drives me out of fandom; nobody could, anymore than anybody could drive any one of you out of fandom. This is where our friends are. This is where our community is. This is what we feel most comfortable with. This is why we come together at conventions, regional conventions, and parties, and all the rest of it. It’s because we are fans, because we are primarily fans, Ted White, Fan Guest of Honour Speech, Aussiecon II And he dreamed, and behold a ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reached the heaven: and behold the angels of God ascending and descending on it. Genesis 29:12 There was a moment during the third day of Aussiecon II (the 43rd World Science Fiction Convention, held in Melbourne, 22-26 August 1985) when I looked upwards from the ground-floor lobby of the Southern Cross Hotel, surveyed the concourse of people hurtling up and down the stairs to the convention rooms above, and thought, ’I love all you people,’ I don’t, of course. Some of those people I dislike, and some dislike me, and many dislike each other. But this feeling of pan-fannish fellowship, emitted from somewhere inside a tired and emotionally strained mind, was truer than most of the thoughts I have, I love the community of fans, the idea of fandom; I felt this most strongly when listening to Ted White’s Fan Guest of Honour Speech: I was in London a couple of months ago for a wedding,., and while I was there I met a fan who I had always wanted to meet, a man named Greg Pickersgill, who wrote some of the most vigorous and fascinating and exciting fan writing of the ’seventies, Greg is a fascinating chap who can argue, I guess, any side of a point We found ourselves in a pub together. The background level of noise was fairly high. We’d been in pubs on and off throughout the afternoon. Our voices rose. We began pounding the table. And at some point Greg said, 'I made a decision years ago that fandom was my life’, and I thought to myself with startling clarity, Why are we arguing? We made the same decision. We’re on the same side of this fence. This is a common community that we’re in, Ted White, Fan Guest of Honour Speech, Aussiecon II My mind was infected anew by the idea of fandom - of a self-governing 2 THE METAPHYSICAL REVIEW No. 5/6 October 1985 Edited, published, and printed by Bruce Gillespie, GPO Bex 5195AA, Melbourne, Victoria 3001, Australia. Phone: (03) 419 479? (at home)} (03) 699 8922 (business hours). Cover printed by Copy Place, Melbourne} cover illustration by Betty de Gabriele. Proofreading by Yvonne Rousseau (who had no opportunity tpi proofread the offset pages in No. 4, so should not be blamed for the typoes on those pages). AVAILABLE FOR8 letters of comment, articles, reviews, traded fanzines, cover artwork, phone calis* postcards, luncheons of comment, and.•• dare I mention.•• SUBSCRIPTIONS: to be paid by people who really haven’t the time to write letters of comment, publish fanzines, etc. Rates until 1 April 1986: SA20 for 5, or $5 per number (internal or surface mail)} $US20 (or equivalent) for 5 (overseas airmail). After 1 April 1986: $A25 for 5, or $6 per number (internal or surface mail)} $US25 (or equivalent) for 5 (overseas airmail). IF I HAVEN'T HEARD FROM YOU RECENTLY you’ll find the Big Red X in the little black box. If it's there, you need to Do Something Fast. ADVERTISING: SAlOO per full page, $A60 per half page, and $A30 per quarter page. SPECIAL MESSAGE (included to see whether er not you read the colophon): I don't have the money to send out all- copies ef this issue airmail overseas, sc some will take three or four months to travel surface mail. They are leaving in late December 1985, because that's when I printed this issue. Yes, I did finish typing the rest of the issue in October... CONTENTS EDITORIAL AND LETTERS ROUSSEAU VS ROTTENSTEINER VS LE GUIN I MUST BE TALKING TO MY FRIENDS 2 LE GUIN•S FANTASY 7 Editor Franz Rottensteiner Elaine Cochrane George Turner THE RIGHT HAND OF LIGHT: 11 Gene Wolfe or MR ROTTENSTEINER AND MRS LE GUIN Andrew Weiner Yvonne Rousseau Doug Barbour Cy Chauvin LAURIE ANDERSON} HUNTERS & COLLECTORS . MUSBLX 4$ Russell Blackford Christopher Priest Greg Egan Brian Earl Brown GIBSQN»S ♦NEUROMANCER* rich brown David J. Lake A HUGO FOR ’NEUROMANCER*?» AWARDS,'WINNERS, AND VALUES 55 Betty de Gabriele Brian W. Aldiss George Turner Fred Jameson ALPISS*S *HELLICONIA WINTER1* Marie Maclean PERSISTENCE LONGER THAN A SEASON 56 Buck Coulson Ralph Ashbrook’ Damien* Broderiok Skel Franz Rottensteiner ..SILVERBERG’S LATEST SILVERBERG’S NEV/ LINE 59 Dave Piper Sydney J• Bounds Michael J. Tolley Andrew Weiner (again) AUEL'S 'CLAN OF THE CAVE BEAR' & people We Also Heard From STEP LIGHTLY THROUGH THE EXPOSITORY LUMPS €4 Jenny Blackford (Continued from Page 2) anarchic community, whose members meet together for the sake of doing so, in defiance of most of the unwritten rules of mundane society, for a few days the sf fan’s world really seemed a heaven separated from everything mean, trivial, barbaric, and competitive in the ’real’ world. That lovely notion has' not yet disappeared, a week after Aussiecon. It has been kept alive partly by the fact that I must go back to work tomorrow, after three weeks of holiday mainly spent on fannish activity. And it will be kept alive by memories of Aussiecon itself, which ran v&ry smoothly and en.abled that great concourse of people « to-take part in a-five-day party, spread over three hotels and innumerable halls and meeting rooms. The members of the organising committee did a remarkable job. It’s a pity they paid the price of , our enjoyment: most of them looked like lightning-struck zombies by the end of proceedings. Special thanks to the Free Press team, Leigh Edmonds and Valma Brown, who (I’m told) volunteered to do this job only at the last minute, and Marc Ortlieb, whose compering of the Hugo Awards ceremony qualifies him for a 1986 Hugo for'Best (impromptu) Dramatic Presentation. (Mentioning the Hugos and Leigh Edmonds in the same paragraph reminds me of the only real disappointment of Aussiecon: Leigh’s neat-miss failures to gain two Hugos. I feel a bit angry at the local, fans who were just, too lazy to send in their Hugo ballot forms voting for Leigh or for George Turner.) I attended Aussiecon to meet' other people, not to attend the programme. Like many other people, I found some items on the programme so interesting that I attended them anyway. This is not supposed to happen to the truly fannish fans, but even the fannish fans - those who stayed in the Fan Lounge all convention - played host to some worthwhile programme items. The enjoyable fannish panels usually featured Ted White or Boseph Nicholas, or both. Ted White, as Fan Guest of Honour, gave great value for money. From whom else could I have found out the endless, unrepeatable details of the fan feuds that have sundered overseas fandom for the past year, and were, nearly forgotten at Aussiecon? Who else could tell authentic stories » about Phil Dick, and New York fandom, and much else besides? Ted’s Fan Guest of Honour Speech was my highlight of the convention, although Race Mathews, during the Opening Ceremony speech, came a a close second by reading out extracts from a letter written by Lee Harding when he was fifteen years old. I had a few official duties ‘at Aussiecon. I was one of the judges of the Short Story Competition* I appeared on some panels. My main job, however, was to shard with Rob Gerrand the Norstrilia Press“table so that the other NP partner, Carey Handfield, was free to ruri the convention. Carey’s friends, the Dennises, watched the table when Rob or I had to be elsewhere, and Kitty Vigo helped as well. Norstrilia PresS sold quite a few books, but I sold very few magazines or Reprints. (Looks as if I’m fated never to make money, not even at a world convention.) I met quite.a few ex-SF Commentary subscribers, including Ed Bryant, who didn’t take out a TMR sub, but who bought lots of NP books, and Angelo d’Alessio from Newark, New Betsey, who had not intended his subscription to lapse in the first place. It was my impression .that overseas sf trade people - authors, professional editors, and publishers - were not much interested in Australian sf, but many Australian readers became aware of the Australian sf publishers (Norstrilia, Paul Collins, and Ebony) for the first time. Paul had his own troupe of book-signing authors to help him. 4 There were a lot of overseas people at the convention - perhaps as many as Hue hundr ed, mainly American.. My feeling was that many of. the- authors were a bit distant to the natives, but perhaps they just didn’t recognise us. Not so Gene and Rosemary Wolfe. They were particularly hardworking ~ always available, seeing people, signing books. I wish I had seen more of the items that featured Gene Wolfe, although I did attend the Question and Answer? Panel on the last day. (At one point Gene called out, ’Don't you shake your head at me, Gillespie', as-if I were denying some revelation he had just made about his own work.