Fred Patten News Page APA-L 168

Many thanks to Chuck Crayne for printing some more copies of Bĵo's heading for RR for me. For those of you who've joined Apa L since I last used this logo heading, the characters are, from left to right, Profesor Mental, SuperCowboy, and Criollo, from the Mexican comic book, CRILLO, EL CABALLO INVENCIBLE. It's Prof. Mental who's always swearing, "¡Rábanos radiactivos!"

Apa L begins a new year this week, and I'm wondering what 1968 will bring. Will 1968 be the year that Apa L folds, or will it see a renascence, maybe? (Probably neither.) Next week will see the publication of our 169th Dist'n, 100 ahead of the number at which Apa F folded. Maybe we should send Porter and Van Arnam copies.) We've already got one of the highest publication numbers of any fan product; another 6 Dist'ns will see us past CRY's folding point, and if we last out 1968, we should pass YANDRO and have almost caught up to the FANTASY ROTATOR. Unless I've forgotten any, that should leave only S-F TIMES ahead of us in the distance.

What will 1968 bring the LASFS? To start with, we've got Bruce Pelz as Director now, and I expect the Meetings to get a lot more orderly and more interesting than they have been. The LASFS should be incorporated before a couple of months are over; will we see our clubhouse before the end of the year? Barry Weissman's lining programs up, and I'll be working on LASFS picnic outings. (Don't forget the Zoo picnic next weekend.) The LASFS will be more or less deeply involved in the F-UNCON, and, since the WorldCon is only a day's drive away, most of us will doubtlessly attend the BayCon as well. The TOFF winners, Takumi and Sachiko Shibano, will be arriving here this Summer, and there'll probably be a round of outings in August to show them Disneyland, Marineland, and all of the other attractions of which we can think. It promises to be a good year.

Fred Hollander -- It's comments like these that make me feel in exile. Most weeks, one night of the long drive from Santa Ana to Los Angeles and back again is enough to tire me out until the next week. Particularly when the long homeward trip would be after midnight, when I'd be sleepy. You sure do make the weekend parties sound good, though.

Don Fitch -- Once the LASFS clubhouse is erected, it will need some sort of resident ~~djinn~~ caretaker, somebody to watch over things such as the Library while we aren't there. Presumably, this somebody will be a fan, but I wonder who? We'd want somebody reasonably reliable, who can be counted on to be able to pay the rent regularly, but most of the reliable fans that I can think of are already settled down. We might be able to get more rent from renting to non-fans, too, but that might bring problems in its turn... We'd want somebody whom we could be sure would get the place cleaned up for Thursday nights, watch over our books, mimeograph, and other material, know which people (visiting fans, etc.) should be allowed the run of the house if they come by at odd hours, and so on. And will we want the clubhouse to be an open fannish center on weekends or at other times? Then our caretaker will have to be on hand at these times, too, so that fandom won't be locked out. (How many keys are we going to allow?) ## I don't think that the current problem is that there's too little discussion of s-f in fanzines (there aren't that many fanzines around today in which to discuss it), but that there's too little discussion of it at the LASFS. Barry is organizing a couple of programs, and we'll see how popular they are, but for the most part recently, the general opinion has been that verbal discussion is too rambling, confused, and badly planned to be of any interest, and that if we want to discuss s-f, we should do it in Apa L. I remember that when I joined the club, a large part of each Meeting used to be taken up with reviews -- 4 or 5 good ones of current books, by as many different members -- or a general clubwide discussion of one particular book. Nobody complained at this time that the discussions were too rambling and vague because they were spontaneous. Dangerous Visions and The Butterfly Kid are the only two books that I'd be willing to swear have been read by more than one member of the club, in the last couple of months, from the discussion and feedback either at the Meetings or in Apa L; if other members are reading s-f, they aren't talking about it -- and why should they, when we're told that discussion if frowned upon as uninteresting? I know that I'm no great speaker, but I used to enjoy hearing those who were good speakers discuss the latest s-f, and I think it's a pity that any new s-f enthusiasts who're good speakers who may come into the club are discouraged from talking about what they've read during the last week. ## I agree with you about "Fans, in the broader sense" -- new ones are in short supply these days. I think that this is another respect in which the disappearance of genzines has made Fandom seem smaller. When the genzines were appearing regularly, you used to hear a lot more about these local fans, until they became regular personalities, even though they never wrote anything themselves. Danny Curran and Marlon Frenzel are two names that come right to mind; I don't think that either ever published a fanzine, but Danny used to be mentioned in every party report out of the Bay Area, and Frenzel will forevermore be associated with, "A fan in need is a fan indeed!" But if local clubs around the country are getting any new members like these, no outsiders ever hear of them any more. Another of the results of the decline & fall of fanzine fandom.

Dave Hulan -- I'd rather have your writing in Apa L than a fancy layout, anyway. ## Everybody seems to like The Butterfly Kid, but how many people have read Anderson's first book (in collaboration with Michael the Theodore Bear Kurland), Ten Years to Doomsday? A couple of years ago, I mentioned in one of my apazines that it was sitting on my bookshelf right in front of Poul Anderson's After Doomsday, and a number of people suggested possible titles to fit between the two.

Bill Glass -- The Centennial Exposition was in 1876, so I expect that the Bicentennial Exposition would be in 1976. ## Galouye's written a couple of other novels since Dark Universe, getting progressively worse, unfortunately.