#2213

Written by Fred Patten, and intended for Apa L, 2213^th Distribution, LASFS Meeting No. 3661, October 11,2007.
Golden State Colonial Convalescent Hospital, 10830 Oxnard Street, North Hollywood, California 91606-5098.
Telephone: hospital(818) 763-8247; personal (818) 506-3159 * eMail:fredpatten@earthlink.net

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My sister Sherrill brought me to last Thursday's LASFS meeting. I got more goodies than usual; Karl Lembke brought me more County Library books, Charlie Jackson brought me a bottle of ginger beer, and Rob Powell delivered a Cartoon/Fantasy Organization 30^th anniversary T-shirt designed by Mitch Beiro, a gift from the club. (Thanks, guys.) Brett Achorn told me that he has seen all 24 episodes of The Third: The Girl With the Blue Eye, and he does not think that the last four episodes are as bad as they were reviewed to be, so I guess that I will watch them, after all. Jerry Pournelle had trouble (gasp!) getting his computer to show a tribute to the 50^th anniversary of Sputnik. Arlene Satin(?) reported that the LASFS' booth and panel at the West Hollywood Book Fair the previous Sunday had been very popular, and that the new free LASFS bookmark designed by Frank Wu had been premiered there. Gavin Claypool(?) reported that David Gerrold had been informed that he was this year's Forry Award recipient, and that he promised to attend Loscon 34 to receive the Award in person. I asked if the club could do something about correcting the inconsistencies that were pointed out during the Award discussions, in the list of Forry Award recipients on the club's/Loscon's website, instead of just forgetting about them; and Marcia Minsky promised to personally make sure that the website gets corrected. It was about 9:15 when the meeting was adjourned, and it looked like it would take a while to set up the presentation by Steve Bartlett of OASIS, the Southern California chapter of the National Space Society, on the 50^th anniversary of Sputnik; so Sherry & I decided to return to the convalescent hospital a bit early rather than let the program get set up around us and then squeeze our way out through the audience when it was just starting.

The LASFS' participation at the 6^th Annual West Hollywood Book Fair has been announced and promoted at the LASFS and in De Profundis for the past month or more, but I do not believe that its specific program has been archived in any LASFS publication. It may be a little late now, but for the record, here it is from the Book Fair's website:

WHAT MAKES A GOOD SCIENCE FICTION/FANTASY STORY

What does the Science Fiction/Fantasy writer have to do to write a story that keeps the reader turning the page?
Time: 4:15-5:15pm
Dr. Jerry Pournelle (co-author of Lucifer's Hammer, Footfall), Todd McCaffrey (Dragonsblood, co-author of Dragonholder & Dragon's Kin with Anne McCaffrey, Steven Barnes (Star Wars: The Cestus Deception, Great Sky Woman: A Novel, Charisma)
Moderator: Karl Lembke
Signings @ The Los Angeles Science Fantasy booth
Pavilion: Comics, SciFi, Horror Pavilion
Pavilion: Comics/SciFi/Horror

I took one of the new Frank Wu bookmarks to give to the Eaton Collection at the UCRiverside Library. LASFans were urged to take stacks and put them in s-f books in bookstores and libraries. I do not know how bookstores react to this, but I get books from the library all the time that have bookmarks in them, presumably left by previous readers. I have one now from the L.A. County Public Library, The Cat Master by Bonnie Pemberton, that has a bookmark in it - well, it is one of the County Library's own bookmarks, listing American Indian Authors ("Favorites of the American Indian Resource Center"), so that does not prove anything. Still, it should not hurt to insert the LASFS' snazzy new bookmark into a lot of the public libraries' s-f books.

On Friday, Craig Miller e.mailed me that the recipient of this year's Rotsler Award, to be presented at Loscon 34, will be Terry Jeeves, and that this has already been reported in Dave Langford's newszine Ansible (#243, October 2007).

Since this and the recipient of the Forry Award are not really secrets, I sent a press release to the Science Fiction Awards Watch website now instead of waiting until after the con. This may entice a few more attendees to the Loscon. The SF Awards Watch posted the news on Saturday, with links to our Loscon 34 website and to their own description of the Forry Award. The latter notes that, "The award is for lifetime achievement in the fields of science fiction and fantasy, so a long career is essential. You do not have to be alive to win, but LASFS apparently prefers to honor people whom they know can still enjoy the experience."

Fred Patten writes:

Loscon 34, 23 - 25 November 2007 in Los Angeles, will be the venue for the presentation of three awards; the Forry Award, the Rotsler Award, and the Evans-Freehafer Award.

The latter is kept secret until the Loscon presentation, and it is for the person (invariably a LASFS member) who has done the most for the club during the previous year. But the other two awards are pertinent to the s-f field, are decided early. Both were decided for 2007 during the past week.

The Forry Award, for lifetime service to the science fiction community, was voted by the LASFS membership at its meeting of 27 September to be presented to David Gerrold.

The Rotsler Award, for lifetime work of outstanding fan artists, was selected by a panel of three judges appointed by the Southern California Institute for Fan Interests, Inc. (SCIFI). This year's recipient will be Terry Jeeves. There will be a display of Jeeves' fanzine art in the Loscon 34 Art Show.

Many thanks to Fred, and our congratulations to the winners.

On Saturday, Sherry took me to the Burbank Media City Center to browse at the Barnes & Noble bookstore, and for dinner at the California Pizza Kitchen. We also visited the B&N/Bookstar in a former theatre in Studio City. Sooner or later I will get to every major bookstore near my hospital. It is too bad that they are all branches of the same mega-chains these days, without the diversity of former large independent or s-f specialty bookstores.

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”ZANAHORIAS ELECTRóNICAS!

-- Comments on Last Week's Distribution:

Vanamonde #749 - (Hertz) Would Belinda Blurb herself be worth crawling through thirty miles of tropical jungle to bite in the neck? Enquiring minds want to know. ## If only we could look through the LASFS' earliest fanzines of the 1930s to see how the club reacted to Air Hawks. In addition to that, how did audiences seven decades ago take to F.P. 1 Does Not Reply, a reportedly-turgid UFA melodrama filmed in both German- and English-language versions (a very young Peter Lorre provided comedy relief in his last role before coming to America to escape the Nazis) set on a giant Floating Platform in mid-Atlantic on which futuristic aeroplanes were to land and refuel to make Europe-to-America (and vice versa) flights possible?

Godzilla Verses #159 -- (DeChancie) Close, but no Havana. Patterns of Chaos (Ace Books, 1978) was by Colin Kapp, not C. C. MacApp. I own Jack Gaughan's cover painting to Part 3 of the serialized version in Worlds of If, May-June 1972; it is hanging in Sherry's apartment. Prisoners of the Sky with dirigible battleships was probably my favorite MacApp novel, as well as I can remember any of them almost forty years later. At the time I was enough of an expert on MacApp to write his entry in Twentieth-Century Science Fiction Writers, 2^nd Edition, edited by Curtis C. Smith, a humongous red tome that the LASFS Library should have; but today, alas, I have forgotten most of MacApp's plots. Hmmm, does the LASFS Library have any of his books? They were all cheap paperbacks that were practically falling apart as soon as they were published, so I will not be surprised if the club does not. ## Christopher Grimm - nope. Doesn't ring a bell. I see that "Bodyguard" was good enough to be made the lead in an anthology of reprints from Galaxy (Bodyguard and Four Other Short Science Fiction Novels from Galaxy, edited by H. L. Gold), and "Someone to Watch Over Me" was good enough to be made the cover story of the October 1959 Galaxy. I must have read them because I read Galaxy cover-to-cover in the '50s, but I do not remember them. I also see in the Locus online s-f index that "he" was a pseudonym of Evelyn E. Smith, 1927-2000.

De Jueves #1551 - (Moffatts) I thought that the pertinent objection to awarding the Forry Award to dead authors was that they will never know about it and be unable to appreciate it as live authors can, not that they are unable to attend the Loscon to give an acceptance speech. Not only has the Forry Award been awarded many times to authors whom we knew would never come to L.A. to get it (Isaac Asimov in NYC, for one), we have awarded it to people whom we were pretty sure would not care enough about it to attend a Loscon to get their trophy even though they were local (Chuck Jones). ## Yes, and Bogie is pretty clearly smarter than Honoka is, too. ## Maybe it was Paradox Alley that I reviewed. I definitely remember reviewing one of John DeChancie's three Starrigger novels, but I cannot remember which or where the review was published. ## And how Joined in Mind and Body is a wish-fulfillment story! Furry fandom is full of amateur fiction where the most obvious thing about the story is that the author really, really, really wishes that he was an anthropomorphic rabbit or a wolf or whatever species the protagonist is instead of a human, but they are usually short stories on their author's own websites rather than book-length and vanity-pressed novels. Come to think of it, Joined in Mind and Body is somewhat unusual in that you feel that the author just wants to have lots of sex with cats while remaining human; he is not interested in becoming feline himself. ## According to Kellogg's own website, Snap, Crackle, and Pop started out in 1932 as friendly but rather ugly "magical gnomes", rather like beardless garden gnomes. They have been redesigned several times to make them cuter, to the point that almost everyone else calls them elves today; but they are still officially gnomes although Kellogg's prefers to call them "children" without specifying the children of what.

Fish Out of Water #243 - (Helgesen) I would prefer to know definitely whether the versions of Smith's "Rat Race" in ASF and in The Worlds of George O. Smith are the same, rather than asserting that they must be without double-checking.

Giraffe's Neck - (Cantor) This is not exactly pertinent, but I just saw a safari video of two giraffes fighting by trying to break each other's necks or legs, at http://glumbert.com/wii/view.php?name=giraffefight ## Don't forget the third novel in DeChancie's Starrigger trilogy, Paradox Alley. If the LASFS Library does not have all three, it should get them from Massoglia Books or some similar used-s-f dealer.

Toony Loons #61 - (Zeff) You should definitely post whatever fannish photos you have, or give them to someone who has a well-known website of fannish photos. ## For what it's worth, it is now Politically Correct for women to refer to themselves as blond, not blonde. ## "All you need to do to get listed on Amazon.com is an ISBN, and most vanity presses supply them as part of the package." Yes, and that is one reason why most vanity presses charge so much. I suggested to the author of Joined in Mind and Body that there were much cheaper self-publishing services, and which produced much more attractive books, than the publisher he was using (BookSurge). He replied that the others did not supply ISBNs, and you could not get onto Amazon.com without an ISB number. I think that at least some of the others can supply ISBNs, but they charge extra accordingly for them. R. R. Bowker LLC in New Jersey, "the exclusive US source of publisher prefixes and accompanying ranges of ISBN numbers for eligible publishers", assigns ISBN numbers in lots of ten for $275.00, so if you are not planning to self-publish ten books, the price for using just one number is really steep. There are advertisements on the Internet for single ISBN numbers for $55.00, but Bowker warns that these are unauthorized and that horrible things may happen to your book if you try to use them. ## Asimov's I, Robot is a collection, not an anthology.

I Plangently Giggle - (Gold) Your http://www.nyx.net/~bgold/deprof.html URL does not work on my computer. I get an "Your search - http://www.nyx.net/~bgold/deprof.html - did not match any documents." error message. ## Thanks for the information about UCLA parking fees in the late 1950s & early '60s. ## About cars that drive themselves, does anyone remember Isaac Asimov's 1953 short story "Sally", about cars with positronic brains? Or Doctor David Henry Keller, M period D period's 1928 "The Revolt of the Pedestrians", which predicted a future in which all Americans evolve into Automobilists who are born, live all their lives, and die in their automobiles (except for the few primitive Pedestrians who escape to the Ozarks)? Or the British Halas & Batchelor 1963 animated cartoon Automania 2000, similar to "The Revolt of the Pedestrians" but with a more gruesome ending?

Oh, All Right!!! - (Lembke) Frankly, the chocolate cake you got at Costco was far superior to most of the other cakes that people have brought to the LASFS. I seldom turn down any cake, but if future cake-donors want to know where to get their cakes, I hope they will be able to shop at Costco. ## Thank you for your report of the West Hollywood Book Fair. Since the LASFS has quit participating in the L.A. Times' Festival of Books at UCLA, let's hope that we can make our presence at the WHBF a new annual tradition. ## It will be easier to ask you for a FOOD GEEK ribbon, but I will endeavor to exhibit the appropriate appreciation for your gourmet delights as well. ## Actually, while it is easy to make fun of the blatant wish-fulfillment in Joined in Mind and Body (which has a sort of pure naļveté to it), the writing is quite smooth and brisk; it is an easy read. "Kenneth Fox" uses some inventive wordplay, too, as when he describes one of the centauroid Kats as "telekinessing" the human protagonist to hold him onto her back while running. The s-f background and action are amateurish, but since there is so little action in the story - it concentrates on the personal interplay & development between the human hero and the Kats on one spaceship - it is easy to read through those scenes quickly. Xanthan Gumm, contrariwise, I had to force myself to read, and I gave up around page 16. It is one of the unfunniest comedies that I ever saw; and since I was not amused by the barrage of burlesque-type sci-fi jokes, the blatant impossibility of the whole scenario - such as that Xanthan Gumm is an alien from the other side of the galaxy who comes to Earth because he wants to star in a Stephen Spielberg movie (hyuk hyuk hyuk); he lands in Chicago because he can't tell the difference between Chicago and Hollywood (hyuk hyuk hyuk); he flies in his personal flying saucer so low that he knocks pedestrians' hats off, which they think proves the Commies are finally invading America (hyuk hyuk hyuk) - is really silly. I literally felt offended that my intelligence was being insulted by the author's assumption that I should think her story was imaginatively funny.

In case I do not have time at tonight's meeting to discuss What I Have Read Lately, here are their titles:

The Sharing Knife: Legacy - Lois McMaster Bujold
Hounded to Death - Laurien Berenson
The Cat Master - Bonnie Pemberton
The Pig Who Saved The World - Paul Shipton
The Burglar in the Library - Lawrence Block
Kitty and the Midnight Hour - Carrie Vaughn
Anime Classics Zettai! 100 Must-See Japanese Anamation Masterpieces.