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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)

 


He Do the Time Police in Different VoicesDavid 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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