06.27.03
While I stayed placidly at home reading old Robertson Davies novels as
midnight struck on 20 June, our runcible roving reporter Jeff VanderMeer
inspected the now-traditional Rowling Riots:
'Ann and I went down to the local B&N to witness the Harry Potter
madness. The mall parking lot was packed. The kids and adults had destroyed the
magazine and children's sections. There was no way we could get a book.
So, instead, we waited outside. A kid came out, probably all of nine years old.
A little girl with braces and a smile on her face. As per our pre-arranged plan,
Ann distracted her with some glitter and a pinwheel. Then I snatched the book
out of the girl's hands and ran for it while Ann hightailed it back to the car.
The girl was screaming her head off, but, luckily, there were so many people
around I was able to lose myself in the crowd. Ann then drove round to pick me
up. I was hiding where we'd planned for me to, at the darkened South Entrance.
It all went off without a hitch. Another successful midnight Potter party
intervention for us.'
Believe him or not, as you prefer.
H.P. Lovecraft is in the news again, with the first ('Spring 2004')
issue of H.P. Lovecraft's
Magazine of Horror now scheduled for October 2003 publication by
Wildside Press. Meanwhile, infinitely more blasphemous and eldritch than Google,
the Cthuugle search engine scans
Lovecraftian texts for your favourite keywords. Failure reports come with
user-friendly suggestions:
Sacrifice your parents to the dark lord Cthulhu.
Gibber until they come and take you away.
Refine your search parameters.
You Can't Do That! The English town of Wincanton, Somerset, twinned
since last year with Discworld's Ankh-Morpork, has been forbidden by the British
government to mention this intangible link on road signs. 'Somerset County
Council wanted Ankh-Morpork added to the signs but Whitehall refused, saying
twin towns had to actually exist.'
(BBC News Online,
18 June)
The James White Award for best short story by an unpublished writer
is changing its schedule, since the next presentation is to be at the 2004 UK
Eastercon rather than in November 2003. (The award after that will be
given at the 2005 UK Worldcon in Glasgow.) Hence a new deadline: 15 January
2004. Current judges are Lois McMaster Bujold, Christopher Priest, Michael
Carroll, Peter F. Hamilton and David Pringle. See
www.jameswhiteaward.com for
further details and entry forms.
Wooden Rocket Awards for SF on the web were announced for the first
time in dizzyingly many categories, with
The Alien Online occupying the star
position as Best Online Magazine. More, much more, all too much more, at
www.WoodenRocket.com
Thog's Masterclass. Dept of Past Future Slang. '"Back
in the twentieth century," he explained, "Bellman of the Rand
Corporation predicted 2% of the work force would be able to produce all the
country could consume by the year 2000 and ..." "Don't roach me
funker," she said. "And don't shirk off in your electro-steamer. This
mopsy wants to poke."' (Mack Reynolds,
Commune 2000 A.D., 1974)
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 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 few dozen Hugo awards. He continues to add books and Hugos.
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