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10.25.02
Ignore the fnords. There are no fnords. Just further snippets of [fnord]
sf news.
Josh Kirby (1928-2001), famous for his highly individual cover
paintings on British editions of Discworld novels and spinoffs, is remembered in
Paul Kidby's cover for
Night Watch by Terry Pratchett. The painting parodies Rembrandt's 'The
Night Watch', which at Terry's suggestion appears on the back cover of the UK hardback for comparison: 'No sense in the artist being smart and some people not
noticing, eh? Note Josh Kirby in the picture where, in the original, Rembrandt
painted himself.' Just half a face, right at the back
News from Pravda.
Possibly taking their cue from all those Australians who gave their religion as
Jedi, young Russians in Perm have been filling out census forms with 'hobbit' or
'elf' as nationality. More inscrutably, certain citizens of Rostov-on-Don claim
their nationality is 'skiff', a term which the Pravda reporter and
translator do not think it necessary to explain. Could this be the local
shorthand for skiffyfan?
R.I.P. Craig Mills (1955-2002), US author of five fantasy
novels published from 1982 to 1995, died from a heart attack on 15 October. His
debut novel was The Bane of Lord Caladon (1982). Dennis
Patrick, US TV character actor who appeared in the 1966-71 Gothic soap opera
Dark Shadows and a spinoff film, died in a fire at his Hollywood Hills
home on 12/13 October; he was 84. Runcible
Ansible #43 correction: actor Michael Elphick did indeed die in
September but was never 'choked by the Force'. This happened to Michael Sheard
in The Empire Strikes Back (fatally) and also Richard LeParmentier in
Star Wars (nonfatally), with the latter scene also prominently featuring
Don Henderson, who
looks rather like Elphick
Eppur Si Muove! Those
London sf meetings
on the first Thursday of each month are poised to move again. The Silver
Cross pub had another bad evening on 3 October (fractured gas line, and thus no
beer, cider, or any other pumped drinks) and looks increasingly unlikely to be
booked for 2003. Heroic pub-crawling in the name of research is currently under
way. Watch for updates at the meetings' unofficial web page.
Thog's Masterclass. Dept of Scenery in Hyperspace: 'Never,
not even in the deepest natural darkness that she had ever experienced, had she
encountered an absence of light as total as this. It was unutterably dark, this
was the Stygian darkness of which poets wrote. This was the pit of Acheron of
which the creators of classic prose made mention. This was a kind of darkness
that made thick, black velvet seem like chiffon by contrast. This was the kind
of darkness that turned pitch into translucent polythene, when the two were
placed side by side. This was the kind of darkness that made the wings of the
raven resemble the pinions of the dove
' (Lionel Fanthorpe,
Neuron World, 1965)
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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