01.18.02

Ansible still hasn't seen either the Harry Potter movie or The Lord of the Rings, but Tolkien's greatest fan made a special pilgrimage to the latter…

Michael Moorcock LOTR: 'Bloody hell. This is like reading some Astoundings after I'd been told how good they were. This stuff seems even worse, judging by the movie, than when I first saw it in the fifties… No real death, no real tragedy, no real women. It's the last fucking unicorn opera I watch in a long while.' So we hope it wasn't an elvish curse that laid Mike low with blood clot problems: on 14 January he was about to enter hospital 'for some sort of emergency exploration and possible bypass surgery (not heart — artery crap — heart's strong as anything, but clots seem to be result of previous surgery, so it goes). Brought low by an intrusive clot and I didn't even have to attend an SF convention.'

Philip K. Dick Award nominees for best US sf paperback original of 2001: Ship of Fools by Richard Paul Russo, Compass Reach by Mark W.Tiedemann, Divine Intervention by Ken Wharton, In the Company of Others by Julie E.Czerneda, The Ghost Sister by Liz Williams, Meet Me in the Moon Room by Ray Vukcevich. Winner to be announced 30 March.

Cele Goldsmith Lalli (1933-2002), influential SF magazine editor under her unmarried name Cele Goldsmith, died in a car accident on 14 January; she was 68. As 1958-1965 editor of Amazing and Fantastic, she bought first stories by Thomas Disch, Ursula Le Guin, Roger Zelazny, and other luminaries.

As Others See Us. BBC Online on the mysteries of back-story: '… often back story occurs in films of a sci-fi nature. It could be just coincidence that the popular image of sci-fi fans is of trivia-minded obsessives who would love this sort of thing.' Well, there goes Citizen Kane and other formerly respected movies.

Vote Early, Vote Often. Hugo Award nominations opened on 9 January.

Thog's Masterclass. Dept of Colloquial Speech. 'Oh, you are so violent in your temper. Can't you guess what reduces me to this abominable weakness?' (Anne Rice, Blood and Gold, 2001)

David Langford is a writer, editor, physicist, bon vivant, and software consultant. His monthly SF 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.