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October 7, 2005
That planned third edition of the SF Encyclopedia is a
long way off, but rudimentary stirrings have been detected amid
the primordial slime, in the form of a
minimalist website containing an author questionnaire and
hardly anything else....
Christopher Priest's novel The Prestige is now
in pre-production as
a Nolan
brothers film, with photography to begin in January. The
obligatory author soundbite: 'Interviewed at his luxury home on
the south coast of England, Mr Priest said, "Hic." Later
he added, "Pass the Alka-Seltzer."'
The Rev. Graham Taylor of Shadowmancer fame
uttered the ultimate blasphemy while addressing Cornish
schoolchildren: saying that Harry Potter was gay (and also that
Rowling's villains were wimps). Actually the Potter line -- 'As
for Harry Potter, well, he's not the only gay in the village' --
was a frightfully droll allusion to a British TV
show your editor does not watch. The kids apparently didn't see it
that way, and became 'excitable'; offended school staff told
Taylor to make himself scarce. (CNN
story)
As Others See Us. Another classic opening from Dave
Itzkoff of the
New
York Times: 'Sometimes, when devoted fans of fantasy and
science-fiction entertainment -- for economy's sake, let's just
call them geeks -- get together ...' (2 October) The story covers
a new TV sf series called Threshold, which
we should be very careful not to call sf: 'It's all played real
and true, and it's not played as science fiction,' says producer
David Heyman. 'It's played as science fact.' Itzkoff infers the
reason for this diplomatic deception: 'for a contemporary sci-fi
series to find a place on a network's schedule, it can't look too
much like a sci-fi series.'
R.I.P. Hamilton Camp (1934-2005), London-born
actor who appeared in Star Trek: Voyager and ST: Deep
Space Nine, and voiced characters in many sf/fantasy tv
cartoons, died on 2 October; he was 70.
Richard
E. Cunha (1922-2005), cult horror/sf director remembered for
his late-1950s films She Demons, Giant from the
Unknown, Missile to the Moon and Frankenstein's
Daughter, died on 18 September at age 83.
Charles
L. Harness (1915-2005), US patent attorney and much-loved sf
author, died on 20 September aged 89, following a lengthy illness.
He wrote several works of classic sense-of-wonder sf, notably his
influential first novel The Paradox Men (1953 as Flight
into Yesterday), which moved Brian Aldiss to coin the
description "Widescreen Baroque"; the extraordinary
art-versus-science melodrama "The Rose" (1953); and the
cosmologically audacious The Ring of Ritornel (1968) --
all personal favourites for which I'm still grateful. (Washington
Post obituary)
Jerry Juhl (1938-2005), US puppeteer and screenwriter who
joined the Jim Henson Company in 1961 and was chief writer for
The Muppet Show, several Muppet films, Fraggle Rock,
etc., died on 26 September.
British Fantasy Awards presented at Fantasycon 2005 on 2
October:
- Novel (August Derleth Award): Stephen King, The
Dark Tower VII: The Dark Tower
- Novella: Christopher Fowler, Breath
- Short: Paul Meloy, 'Black Static' (The Third
Alternative #40)
- Collection: Stephen Gallagher, Out of His Mind
- Anthology: Andrew Hook, ed., The Alsiso Project
- Artist: Les Edwards
- Small Press: Elastic Press
- Special (Karl Edward Wagner Awards): Nigel Kneale
Miscellany.
Trufen.net
is having fun with Ansible's phony legal threat.
Can't
Get Off the Island, the best from 35+ years of fanwriting by
2005 Worldcon Fan GoH Greg Pickersgill, is now available from
Fishlifter Press with proceeds to the SF Foundation:
enquire here.
Peter Beagle
is reportedly a victim of injustice, though the details are
worryingly unclear.
Thog's Masterclass. Unusual Psi Powers Dept.
'Lucille Roman sat in a remote and lonely spot and mentally chewed
her fingernails ...' (George O. Smith, Fire In the Heavens,
1958) 'I
shed mental tears, and I could see the same in Eve's eyes as she
looked down at me.' (Otto Binder, 'Adam Link's Vengeance', 1940)
David
Langford is an author and a gentleman. His newsletter,
Ansible,
is the essential SF-insider sourcebook of wit and incongruity. His
most recent books are The
SEX Column and other misprints, collecting ten years of
columns and essays for SFX magazine; Different
Kinds of Darkness, a new short-story collection of
horror, SF, and fantasy; Up
Through an Empty House of Stars: Reviews and Essays 1980-2002,
100 pieces of Langfordian genre commentary; and He
Do the Time Police in Different Voices, a short-story
collection that brings together all of Dave's SF parodies and
pastiches. (This is a scary thought. Are you ready to laugh that
hard?)
Dave lives in Reading, England with his wife Hazel, 25,000
books, and a couple of dozen Hugo awards. He continues to add
books and Hugos.
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