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October 28, 2005
Hallowe'en approaches, and one of my spies has provided a link
to seasonal uplift
from Edgar Allan Seuss; scroll down for a list of this
author's other titles....
As Others See Us. Travis Elborough of The Guardian
celebrated the appearance of
Interzone
200 but couldn't resist inserting an acid drop: 'Some things,
however, appear impervious to change: gratifyingly SF writers
today, it seems, are content to look as geeky as ever they did in
the 1980s. A photograph of the lead interviewee, Richard Calder,
in which the author is captured bathed in red light and sporting
glasses whose lenses could windscreen an Austin Maxi, screams "here
is a man who had his lunch money pinched as a child".' (22
October)
Anne Rice returns, still writing about immortal
supernatural entities but with a certain change of emphasis: her
new one is 'a novel about the 7-year-old Jesus, narrated by Christ
himself. "I promised," she says, "that from now on
I would write only for the Lord."'
Newsweek
at MSBNC.com headlines this as 'her most daring book yet' --
though the Rice approach looks safely devout, and there seems
little chance that the infant Christ will radiantly sink his teeth
into deserving throats.
Doctor Who won three of the British National TV
Awards presented in the Albert Hall on 25 October: most popular
drama, actor and actress. (BBC
News)
Prediction Corner. Words of wisdom from Brian Stableford
in 1989: 'Very few new British writers have managed to establish
themselves within the last ten years, but the next ten years will
be different. The bandwagon is rolling, and anyone who is good
enough, and prepared to put in the requisite work, ought to be
able to jump aboard.' (The Way to Write Science Fiction,
1989)
As Others See Us II. From a Guardian Guide
article on campaigns to save cancelled tv shows, some of which are
more equal than others: 'But if sci-fi shows are more likely to
attract fans with too much time and not enough social skills, more
surprising are those not wanting closure or validation, but
fighting for (whisper it) quality TV.' (Stuart McGurk, 22 October)
Press Releases We Couldn't Bear To Continue Reading:
'Peterborough Science Fiction Club have recently restructured its'
website ...' (Which is here.)
Miscellany.
George
Takei uncloseted.
Want to design the
2006
Hugo base?
'Tis
the Season To Be Jelly.
Space
research finally catches up with the awful warning about
mixed-sex crews in Stranger in a Strange Land (1961).
Thog's Masterclass. Heavy/Light Water Dept, or Squid
vs Archimedes. 'The main body of the thing is sort of an
inverted cup, like a half-inflated bladder, surrounded by a great
ring of bone and muscle that anchors these tentacles. The bladder
fills and empties with water to enable the creature to rise to the
surface, or descend far below -- the submarine principle. By
itself it doesn't weigh much, although it is amazingly strong.
What it does, it empties its bladder to rise to the surface, grabs
hold, and then begins to fill again.' (George R.R. Martin,
'Guardians' in Tuf Voyaging, 1986)
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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