08.30.02
Our ace reporter Tony Cullen (moonlighting from the
British SF Association magazine Vector)
provides a rare Runcible photo-exclusive with his digital snap of an unexpected
habitué of the Silver Cross pub on Whitehall London fandom's new
meeting place on the first Thursday evening of each month.
Tony comments: 'The opening behind the rodent is not a mouse-hole, but the
entrance to a Rentokil mouse-trap, or poison container, which seemed to be no
deterrent, since I saw it pass through the thing more than once!
The only
remaining question is: Should fandom: (a) kill it; (b) adopt it; or, (c) give it
a LiveJournal account?'
Jeff Noon, still busy putting distance between himself and his
shameful win of the 1994 Arthur C. Clarke
Award for sc**nce f*ct**n (with his novel Vurt), assured readers of
the Cheltenham Festival newsletter that sf was a dying genre, now written only
by zombies. We look forward to the contemptuous return of his thousand quid to
the Clarke Award administrator.
John Wyndham is still remembered, more or less, by reporters at The
Independent newspaper. From an August story about about giant squid taking
over the world: 'Most people are familiar with the opening lines of Tennyson's
The Kraken Wakes, either through the original or via John Wyndham's 1953
thriller, The Day of the Triffids.'
They Told You So. The August 2002 BBC poll of the top 100 famous
Britons of all time should confirm every fundamentalist's worst fears by its
inclusion of those very similar authors J.R.R. Tolkien, J.K. Rowling and
Aleister Crowley.
Thog's Nonfiction Futurology Masterclass, or, What 2050 Will Be
Like If We All Have Cyborg Links With Our Computers: 'With super-intelligent
brains, cyborgs have used their ability to think in hundreds of dimensions, to
come up with a new Theory of the Universe. New forms of energy conversion were
discovered. Now that the nature of light is better understood, it has become
possible to obtain unparalleled energy supplies by direct light-to-heat
conversion. Distant planets and galaxies are being visited since it was
discovered that travelling faster than the speed of light was a trivial
exercise.' (Kevin Warwick
[Professor of Cybernetics at the University of Reading, England],
I, Cyborg, 2002)
David Langford is an author and a gentleman.
His newsletter, Ansible,
is the essential SF-insider sourcebook of wit and incongruity. He lives in Reading, England with his wife Hazel, 25,000 books, and a few dozen Hugo awards. He continues to add books and Hugos.
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