SF COMMENTARY 94 June 2017 64 pages IN THIS ISSUE: COLIN STEELE BRUCE GILLESPIE LEIGH EDMONDS ROBERT DAY JENNIFER BRYCE RANDY BYERS STEPHEN CAMPBELL ELAINE COCHRANE DITMAR (DICK JENSSEN) JEANETTE GILLESPIE MIKE GLYER STEVE JEFFERY CAROL KEWLEY PATRICK MCGUIRE LLOYD PENNEY ALEX SKOVRON STEVE STILES TONY THOMAS CASEY WOLF RAY WOOD Cover: Steve Stiles: ‘Mages’. SF COMMENTARY 94 June 2017 64 pages SF COMMENTARY No. 94, June 2017, is edited and published by Bruce Gillespie, 5 Howard Street, Greensborough, VIC 3088, Australia. Phone: 61-3-9435 7786. AVAILABLE ONLY FROM EFANZINES.COM: Portrait edition (print page equivalent) at http://efanzines.com/SFC/SFC94P.PDF or Landscape edition (widescreen): at http://efanzines.com/SFC/SFC94L.PDF or from my NEW email address: [email protected] FRONT COVER: Steve Stiles: ‘Mage’. :: BACK COVER: (and p. 3): Randy Byers: ‘Cannon Beach’. Artwork: Ditmar (Dick Jenssen) (pp. 24, 28, 29); Stephen Campbell (p. 24); Elaine Cochrane (p. 26); Taral (p. 49); Casey Wolf (p. 60); Claude Perrault (p. 62). PHOTOGRAPHS: Jeanette Gillespie (pp. 24, 27); LynC (p. 24); Ian Roberts (p. 27); Dick Jenssen (p. 29); Leigh Edmonds (pp. 21, 38–9); Ray Wood (pp. 51–2); Casey Wolf (p. 62). 4 THE FIELD Colin Steele 30 LEIGH EDMONDS’ ‘HISTORY OF 4 End of an era at The Canberra Times AUSTRALIAN FANDOM’ PROJECT 6 Books about SF and fantasy 35 ON HOT PURSUIT OF FANZINE 9 Australian young adult fiction TREASURE: THE PERTH TRIP 9 British science fiction Leigh Edmonds 13 British alternative world SF 14 British fantasy, dark fantasy, horror 37 THREE YEARS (NINE ISSUES) OF 17 US science fiction SF COMMENTARY 18 New Zealand slipstream Robert Day 18 Canadian young adult SF and fantasy 50 POETRY, CREATIVITY, AND THE MOON featuring 20 I MUST BE TALKING TO MY ON THE TWENTY-FIFTH ANNIVERSARY FRIENDS OF THE MOON LANDING: 20 JULY 1994 Alex Skovron 20 2016: THE YEAR THE WORLD WENT Ray Wood AWAY Patrick McGuire Bruce Gillespie Carol Kewley 57 FANZINE DIPPED IN A BATHTUB Steve Jeffery 23 WHAT A TIME IT WAS! Bruce Gillespie 60 THE ORIGINS OF CREATIVITY Jennifer Bryce and Tony Thomas Casey Wolf Stephen Campbell Ditmar (Dick Jenssen) 62 THOUGHTS OF MR PENNEY Elaine Cochrane Lloyd C. Penney 28 ROTLSER AWARD TO DITMAR Mike Glyer 2 End of an era Gillespie fanzines go all-electronic Ever since postage prices, especially overseas postage, began rising steeply ten years ago, I’ve had increasing difficulty in supporting the print publication of SF Commentary, Treasure, and my other magazines, such as Steam Engine Time. However, I have received regular freelance indexing work during the last five years, so have been able to print a small number of copies for major contributors, subscribers, and fanzine publishers who sent me paper magazines or books. Suddenly at the end of February this flow of regular work stopped, for reasons I may never discover, so I find myself with no spare income to print and post any fanzines other than a few copies of my ANZAPAzine *brg*. This is embarrassing, because some people have sent me $100 subscriptions in the expectation of receiving print copies. If I receive any unexpected income over the next year or so, I will meet those expectations. Your names are in my card index. The trouble with miracles, however (as Tom Disch once said) is that, although they happen, they cannot be relied upon. Please do not send me further subscriptions. I can’t meet your expectations. The same goes for those people who have no way of downloading SF Commentary from Bill Burns’ eFanzines.com. I also know their names, and will print copies for these few people if a miracle turns up. (Miracles have been in short supply during 2017.) Those people who send me print fanzines and do not themselves post to eFanzines.com will have to decide whether they still want to keep me on their files. I certainly don’t want to miss out on such eminent fanzines as Banana Wings and Trap Door. ‘Always look on the bright side of life,’ sang the Monty Pythons in similar circumstances. I am forcibly retired at last. If most people on the mailing list are willing to download and read SFC and Treasure from eFanzines.com, this gives me much greater freedom to produce smaller issues more frequently. It’s only the oddities of the postage system that have forced me to limit the size of issues to between 64 and 72 pages. My ideal would be a fanzine produced fortnightly or monthly containing all the great stuff that I’ve received, whether it amounts to 10 pages or 100 pages. If I have to say goodbye to valued old friends, I will grieve . But many such friends have disappeared over the years, and new friends are always getting in touch. So long — and thanks for all the fish to come. Bruce Gillespie, May 2017 Randy Byers: ‘Cannon Beach’ 3 Colin Steele The field End of an era at The Canberra Times: The diminished Australian scene As I review Dreaming in the Dark in February 2017 (see below), I would not have been particularly aware of its publication if I had been a reader of the mainstream Australian newspapers and literary magazines. According to Bruce Gillespie, I was the last regular science fiction and fantasy review for a major national newspaper outlet. My 30-year stint as a reviewer for The Canberra Times ceased in late 2016 when The Canberra Times, which had been running down its local reviews for some time, informed its local reviewers that all copy would be coming from Fairfax Literary Central in Melbourne. The merging of the three separate book review pages in The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald, and The Canberra Times has had a dramatic impact on the number of national book reviews. The reviews were also circulated on the web by Fairfax on their online regional book pages across Australia, and this source of over 100 outlets has also been lost. This has had a particular impact on genre, notably crime, SF, and fantasy, being publicly noticed as well as regional Australian authors. The Australian only very occasionally publishes SF reviews by James Bradley and George Williams, while the Australian Book Review seems to take a literary highbrow approach to genres, as do some of the literary websites. Dreaming in the Dark thology Dreaming Again.’ edited by Jack Dann (PS Australia; $39) It is interesting to note the authors from that first anthology who have made it through to this one, such as The good news is that Pete and Nicky Crowther, foun- Sean Williams, Paul Brandon, Rosaleen Love, Terry ders and publishers of PS Publishing, the British special- Dowling, and Sean McMullen. It would have been nice ist genre imprint , have begun an Australian publishing to see some of the still active authors in that 1998 volume, operation PS Australia. Well-known author and antholo- such as Lucy Sussex, appearing in Dreaming in the Dark, gist Jack Dann is PS Australia’s managing director. with the addition of some Australian authors, such as The first book to appear, Dreaming in the Dark, edited Kaaron Warren, with her dark magic realism stories. by Jack Dann, brings together a number of Australia’s Editors, however, can never win when balancing story leading science fiction, fantasy and horror authors. It’s availability and textual space. a very nicely produced hardback with cover and artwork Dann, in the original anthology Dreaming Down-Under, designed by Greg Bridges. reflected on the impressive 1998 Powerhouse Museum Jack Dann reflects that Dreaming in the Dark ‘will be SF event with Harlan Ellison that I attended. That sort the third part of the Australian anthology triptych begun of impact and attendance now tends to go to ComicCons by Janeen Webb and myself with the 1998 World Fantasy in Sydney and Melbourne. Award-winning Dreaming Down-Under and the second an- Dann writes, with reference to the present anthology, ‘This is a great time to be involved in Australian genre 4 fully composed vignettes about Mars. Bradley reflects on the life and ultimate death of the universe as seen through the spectrum of Mars in the near past and far future. A number of the stories in the anthology tackle con- temporary social issues, perhaps too many for the overall balance of the collection. Venero Armanno’s ‘Heat Treatment’ is a claustrophobic disturbing story, with a father fighting his irrational fear of hurting his own child. This begins with his fear that he would hold his baby over a hospital balcony, presumably in the style of Michael Jackson. Armanno, in a lengthy postscript, notes that this fear is called PostPartum OCD. In ‘Fade To Grey’, Janeen Webb, co-editor with Dann of the previous two Dreaming anthologies, has her main character, a retired journalist, moving into a Newcastle beachside apartment block, only to find a dozen female ghosts, who seek her journalistic help to expose an incompetent, and ultimately deadly, surgeon, known as ‘the Pig’. Libby faces a personal race against time as she realises she may come under that very same surgeon’s scalpel. In ‘Neither Time Nor Tears’, Angela Slatter juxta- poses ‘memory and materia’ as a girl sifts through the contents of her deceased grandmother’s Paddington terrace house. A 1917 war medal is the key to a dark family secret, as family fraud and deception take a bitter twist. The last story in the collection, ‘Moonshine’, by Simon Brown, like Slatter’s, is built upon personal memories, in this case to re-create a story of dual identity fiction, which is still in its ‘Golden Age’!’ I cannot share in the bootlegging 1920s.