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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.

a mouse

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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