Issue 7 - December 1994

One thing that SF fans and Mensans have in common is their conviction of their own infallibility on matters of personal opinion. SF fans, for instance, are infamous for engaging in heated debates over the relative merits of Kim Stanley Robinson's and Ben Bova's visions of Mars, or of Battlestar Galactica and Galactica 1980. Mensans, on the other hand, are members of an association best known for being the only polite way to inform other people that you are smarter than them. Mensan SF fans are therefore likely to be even more argumentative than either of the above groups in defending their favourite books, movies and TV series, at least if my stereotypes of them are accurate (which they are, and anyone who disagrees with me is a complete idiot). In this spirit, I present below my top 10 SF lists, and pray your forgiveness for insulting your sensibilities with my choices.

Contents

Worlds of Fandom: Star Trek: The Next Generation

Interview with Grant Stone, part 2

Letter

Serial: Other People's Flesh, part 4

Worlds of Fandom: Star Trek: The Next Generation

The seven year television run of Star Trek: The Next Generation wound up in the US on 23 May 1994 with the transmission of the final double episode All Good Things... but the show's fan following has far from declined (as if anyone believed it would). Moreover, after the success of Star Trek Generations, which opened in the US on 18 November 1994, it seems that the series' future is assured not only in the memories of fans but also on the silver screen for a number of years to come.

Star Trek: The Next Generation debuted on 3 October 1987 with Encounter at Farpoint to a lukewarm reception. Indeed, the first two and a half seasons disappointed most fans and struggled to achieve high ratings. With Gene Roddenberry at the helm, the series was clearly being produced with its predecessor firmly in mind. However television had changed over the preceding two decades, no less than the Star Trek universe had changed in the 85 notional years between the series. Beset by industrial and creative disagreement, Next Generation required a new approach if it was to survive as long as its predecessor.

This new approach was provided by the entry into the production team of Rick Berman and Michael Piller, who later took over the series completely with Roddenberry's death in 1991. It was at this point that the series' fortunes began to turn. Most fans consider the season 3 cliffhanger/season 4 opener The Best of Both Worlds to be the finest hour of Star Trek: The Next Generation. However few would deny that its plotting, tone and pace owe more to Steven Spielberg than to the original series or its Great Bird of the Galaxy, Gene Roddenberry. The same is true of many of the series' other highlights such as Conspiracy, Yesterday's Enterprise and Descent.

Like the original Star Trek, Next Generation could not be described as a cutting edge series. Although its special effects and make-up were impressive, the plots were frequently derivative, and the characters (a Klingon, an empath, an android and several humans) uniformly American in all but name. Moreover, Roddenberry's injunction that Starfleet officers should radiate the harmony of their era made it difficult for writers to build dramatic tension between the major characters without resorting to contrived plot devices.

Nevertheless, working within these limitations, the series' achievement was considerable. With 178 episodes, Next Generation ran for two and a quarter times as long as its predecessor, garnering 16 Emmy awards and becoming the highest rating syndicated television show in America along the way. (Star Trek: Deep Space Nine achieved second place). It is far and away the most successful science fiction television series of all time.

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Interview with Grant Stone, part 2

In the second part of our interview, well known Western Australian SF fan Grant Stone tells us about the science fiction and fantasy collection he has built as a librarian at Murdoch University, the science fiction personalities he has spoken to on his Faster Than Light Radio Show, and the Golden Age of Australian SF.

IQ: Tell me about the current state of the science fiction and fantasy collection here at Murdoch.

GS: That collection grew out of an interest in building for Maureen's thesis, as I was saying. When the NatCon was here in '79, Way Con 79, which would have been Swan Con 4, Anne McCaffrey came as a guest of honour. I was a fan guest of honour along with a fan from the Eastern States. I felt honoured to be a guest of honour at such a relatively young stage in my life of being involved with the science fiction community, so I thought, one thing I can do is make radio shows. I knew this from high school days, when I had been plucked out of obscurity by the local radio station to run a top-40 spinner programme; there were twelve of us, including myself and Greg Pearce of Channel 10 newsreading fame. Greg was a mate of mine at high school and we both went down to the radio station, and there were three of us offered contracts at the end of the year to work there. Greg didn't have the entrance to get into teachers' college, which is what he wanted to do, so instead of just bumming around for a couple of years he decided to take up the radio station's offer. Now he's the one making all the money and got fame and glory, and the rest of us who had to study like crazy are totally bloody useless!

The radio show became my contribution to promote the convention, and it also became a way to get review copies of books. It took a while to do, but once I'd built up a line of supply with the various publishers, we started getting deluged with books. It seemed to me that most publishers said, "You want to review what? Science fiction? We've never had anyone ask for these books before! We send them out to papers, but nobody ever talks about them," which is pretty much still the case, it seems to me. Occasionally someone slings a few comments in the genre direction as though somehow this will keep their readers happy. I don't think people realise how big the market is, actually, for these books. Since Terry Pratchett and Douglas Adams and Terry Brooks have broken into the best-selling ranks, and Anne McCaffrey for that matter, and Julian May maybe; since they have managed to find their way onto the New York Times best-seller lists in the States people have started to take a bit of an interest, but that didn't happen until the mid '80s. So in the '70s, science fiction was largely an "undiscovered ghetto", as the fans liked to call it, which meant that the publishers used to send a lot of books. So I convinced the librarian here that the radio show ought to be seen as an extension of my work, so that I could do it in work time, and they got the review copies for the shelves.

The collection started growing not only because of the review copies but because I continued to be involved in the fan community, and [acquired collections] whenever fans moved out of digs or out of lodgings or things fell apart. WASFA, the association I was talking about, was formed in '76 and existed until '79, then was disbanded after an internal split and a mass leaving of the Trekkies. But WASFA had a library, and after languishing for 18 months in a cupboard waiting to see ff anything was going to resurface of WASFA, and presumably some of the stuff drifting sideways into other people's collections, they voted to send it to Murdoch. So we got a large collection of Analogs and Astoundings of '60s-'70s vintage, and maybe a couple of hundred paperbacks courtesy of WASFA. And that wasn't atypical; fans like Roy Ferguson, who was heavily involved in WASFA in those early days and was shifting to Melbourne courtesy of RMIT, decided not to take most of his paperbacks with him, and instead of taking them to an op shop or a swap meet, he sent them to Murdoch. So the collection grew through buying (and we've bought some, although not heavily purchased), buying collections (which is a very cheap way to do it - "So, you've got a collection of 200 paperbacks; how about $50?", "Oh, OK" - that sort of purchase, bargain basement level but more than you'd get from a second hand book store), so that's one way the collection has grown, and then the review copies of new material; these days, a lot of hard covers. In the early days I wouldn't have seen a hard cover from one year to the next, but these days I'd get 10-15 hardcovers a month, which is a lot of books, really. And they find their way to the shelf, after a tortuous route through my office and various piles lying around the place, and that adds to the collection.

Last year we acquired a collection which was the Dandenong Regional Valley Library System science fiction collection. This had been built up over eight years by a guy who was judiciously looking at books discarded through the Victorian public library system, and retrieving all the science fiction titles he could lay his hands on as well as buying paperbacks and looking at books within the Dandenong Valley System that were science fiction and maintaining them in a central store. Now, he retired and the new librarian who came in his place, although he had established a club, had issued 27 issues of the newsletter of the Dandenong Regional Valley Library Science Fiction Readers Group, and had quite an active programme of promoting it, she killed it. And she just basically put around that if anyone wanted all this science fiction, there were four and a half thousand titles lying around in a basement that were up for grabs. So we wrote, said we were interested, and they came last year, and they've now been integrated into the collection as well. What was good for us was the huge collection of anthologies. There are indexes to the anthologies and they've been well used now. The size of the collection grew quite rapidly in the '70s, slowed down a bit in the early '80s, took a pace again in the mid '80s, was slowing down, and apart from this Dandenong donation I was talking about in '93, it's really slowed to a trickle, because if it's not by donation and it's not one of the review copies, there's very little being bought at the moment. I had a philosophy that if it was in Anatomy of Wonder, which is an anthology of the best works in science fiction that's written up by a whole series of different people, and we didn't have it, we should have a copy, therefore maintaining a widely dispersed multilingual core collection of science fiction that's of note. And if there was an anthology in Contento that we didn't have we should buy it, and we should have most of the Hugo shortlisted works for the last 20 years or whatever. Now that programme's never been completed, so there are books of note that we don't have in the collection and which we should hunt down at some stage. But if it requires money, it doesn't get done at the moment.

The collection is in a number of different parts in the library, so we've got books and paperbacks of an everyday nature which are mixed in the literature. That got to be a problem in the mid-'80s: academics teaching comparative literature reckoned "Why can't we find real literature, all we can find is science fiction." So the process was started of taking the science fiction out of the "real" literature and putting it at a genre number at 808.83876, which is where it all is these days. The journals were similarly treated, however not all titles were transferred, so you'll find The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and Analog at 808, but Amazing Stories at 824 for American fiction. So there's some tidying up which still needs to be done that's a decade old now. And similarly there's some authors who have been transferred to 808, and some authors whose works are still in with the literature of the language and country.

There's also a significant collection of this sort of material in the special collections, including a huge fanzine collection; that's huge. The special collections material is a lot of stuff which is incredibly rare, which the fanzines are. We've would have the best collection of Australian fanzines in the world; there's no two ways about that. The active period was really from '65 through to '85, so in those 20 years there was a massive amount of fanzine publishing. Funnily enough the onset of computers and photocopiers being cheap enough seemed to coincide, so that just when the technology was there for everyone to make their own fanzine and make it cheaply without having to learn how to work a Gestetner or printing press, everyone decided they didn't want to do that. Email's taken over as a delivery form to some extent, but I just don't think that people talk to each other with the same sense of literaryness that they did in the '70s. Fans made fanzines; there was a standard and honourable tradition for 10% of the community. These days the percentage of the community interested in making a fanzine has probably fallen by a factor of 10 down to 1%, although the people with the energies to do it like yourself end up getting great kudos, because everyone thinks "Wow, how can they manage to do this?", because nobody else is willing to do it. The fanzine collection was largely by donation, although we did inherit the collections of two of Australia's greatest editors, John Bankson and Lee Edmunds, and in Lee's case we got all his correspondence files as well. We also got from Don Tuck of Tasmania his fanzines from the '50s and early '60s. So the collection has got a huge run of early Australian material that doesn't exist anywhere else, and that's almost priceless. It marries quite well with Don Wollheim's collection of fanzines which are now in Sydney University library in their special collections and which are still fairly unorganised. Don's material is quite substantial, and it's the fanzines that Isaac Asimov had in the '30s and '40s - I mean, these sort of priceless, iconographical objects that people talk about in the literature. Bob Silverburg's early fanzines, because he was a great fan as well. That's how a lot of these writers got started, you know, they wrote to each other and honed down their craft and took commentary and basically contributed to discussions about the field and then started doing it professionally. Michael Moorcock was another great fan before he became a writer; he had a series of fanzines in the '60s before he hit his mettle in the mid '60s and found publishers for his work.

IQ: As the presenter of the Faster Than Light Radio Show, you've interviewed a lot of famous science fiction personalities. Who are some of the most interesting people you've interviewed?

GS: I think I've interviewed Douglas Adams three times now, and he's pretty amazing. He's amazing because he's actually as humorous as he sounds. I think he could be a stand-up comic; big and tall and John Cleese-like, except where John Cleese is thin, he's sort of padded. Terry Pratchett is as small as Douglas is tall, but he's also an extremely funny bloke. So both of those are very enjoyable to talk to, and I've had the privilege of talking to them more than once. Raconteur sort of people... it's pretty hard to go past Harry Harrison. He's one of these guys who, give him a scotch and a cigar and he can just talk all evening with anecdotes of one sort or another, and make the evening sound interesting and pass away, and discussions with him are a bit along that line: "What was it like when you were first starting, Harry?" "Ah, blurbleblahblahdibbledobbledingdong..." and then ten minutes later he'll stop and you'll say, "And Harry, I notice on your CV that at one stage you were living in Norway. How did that go?" "Wahblopblarblebliprhubarbblahblah...", and off he'd go about Norway. He was very good fun to interview.

Of recent interviews, Tad Williams, surprisingly enough, was really a fabulous person to talk to. And I remember the interview with Jean Auel quite well too, she had her third book coming out, The Mammoth Hunters I think it was (or was it her fourth?) in her Children of New Earth (or Children of the Earth?) series, which she calls the overriding arc of a story she's writing. Given the romance nature of the fiction, I was surprised to find how hardheaded she was about the science she was dealing with in the books, and how much research she did. I think I was showing my prejudice in assuming that, given the type of fiction she chooses to write and the pre-history she's attempting to explain, the research would be quite slight, and that's not the case; to the point where she's happy to go off to anthropological conferences and paleo - paleo what? - whatever they are conferences and study bones, and talk about art objects, and she's been a guest at some of them. She's particularly interested in images of the early Earth goddess, the Earth female, which seemed to turn up with alarming regularity seven to eight thousand years ago in a lot of cultures.

The other person that I mentioned, Tad Williams, was interesting simply because the guy was fascinating to talk to. His is not the sort of fiction I engage with easily. It strikes me as being overwritten and underedited, and there's a lot of it; doorstopper sorts of books. But he was fabulous to talk to. And that goes for a lot of authors. There hasn't been an author I've interviewed who I've found impossible to talk to. There have been characters that for one reason or another are almost unbroadcastable. Frank Brinning, who's an Australian author, has got a voice that just puts your teeth on edge, and I didn't want everyone's teeth on edge around the universe as I broadcast it. And strangely enough, the guy who wrote all the - what was his name - A. Bertram Chandler, who was almost an institution in Australia; he wrote the Rimrunner series of books, a boys' adventure/ships in outer space sort of series. Very readable, I might add, and a huge hit in Japan. He is the only Australian who's ever been a guest at a World Convention not held in Australia. His voice was this amazing, high-pitched effeminate squeak; I'd never heard a voice like it. In all honesty, I simply couldn't broadcast it; I mean it was the most bizarre sort of thing, You'd just find yourself cracking up, even though he'd be talking about quite serious subjects, and that's very unusual in a big tall man, as he was. So with those two exceptions, broadcasts seem to get to air no matter what the people are like. Someone like Jack Vance, who I interviewed in '83 when he came out for a convention needed a lot of editing. He was guy who rested for 15 minutes between answers and ummed and ahhed a lot when he wasn't talking, but with a bit of editing was acceptable. You can't do much about the pitch of people's voices. but you can do something about their lack of response.

Frank Herbert's a good memory. interviewed him about eight months before he died, and I didn't realise he was that sick. He was out in Australia for the World Con in Melbourne, and Myers toured him around Australia after the World Con. I interviewed him here in Perth in '85, and he died in '86. So that was pretty sad and pretty strange and pretty eerie. But Frank did not suffer fools gladly, hated talking to idiots, loathed talking about the Dune books like 'So, this is sort of serious ecology as science fiction, is it Mr Herbert?", and, you know, he would rip the shreds off this poor person. So it was with fear and loathing at the end of a day of interviews that I trucked up to his hotel room at the Parmelia thinking that this wasn't going to go down well. I had slotted myself in for a 6 o'clock interview knowing that he would have had interviews since 10 o'clock in the morning, that he didn't suffer fools gladly, that this was his last interview in the State, and that all he wanted to do was go to an evening meal. But I came in and started talking about public radio, which I knew he was involved in at that stage of his life in Seattle which was where he was living, and he had built an environmentally sound house up on Puget Sound, and I knew this about him too. So we spent some time talking about the building of the house and his work with public radio, and then we got round to having an interview. But he still did not like questions that were also-ran questions!

IQ: Last year Eidolon said that this was the Golden Age of science fiction in Australia. Do you think that's happened?

GS: What, did I miss it? Certainly there has never been a time when there have been as many authors published in Australia with the diversity and regularity that there is at the moment, in such a variety of publications, or have the opportunity to be published overseas; that's patently true on the numbers. So in that sense it is a Golden Age if you want to write stories. Given the fact that there are new writers out there who are getting screenplays up and they are being made, and we're getting some pretty strange screenplays that I would call Australian science fiction. Timegarden, Dead End Drive-in, Turkey Shoot, these are all futuristic, special effects in some cases, strange scenarios straight out of the science fiction pulps, and you'd have to say that's more than we've had before. We didn't make any science fiction films in the '50s, in the heyday of science fiction films.

But as to the amount of publishing that's going on, it is demonstrably larger than anything that happened in the '50s or '60s, and we had a long period where nothing really happened at all, during the '70s. So in that sense this is the Golden Age. And the success of people like Sean McMullen in the East, Terry Dowling now breaking into the States, George Turner being published in England to great fanfare and winning the Arthur C Clarke award a couple of years ago, being published in the US. Older writers like Win Whiteford; the whole of his list being picked up and repackaged by Ace in the mid '80s. Keith Taylor winning the fantasy awards and writing his Bard series out of Tasmania, never being published in Australia at all. I mean, these are successes, and yes, there are people out there being published far more than there was before. And with young writers coming on like Sean, or Greg Egan for that matter from WA, don't see themselves as writing for an Australian audience, even though they come from Australia and from time to time are published here. They see themselves as writing for an international audience, which is much how the British writers saw themselves in the '60s.

So, Golden Age I suppose you'd have to call it. Although I'd say it's probably a precursor to the Golden Age. There's a lot of good people in the in the wings. But if a volume of them got published, and we got to the stage where there were 30 or 40 published authors, I think you start getting the critical mass, where, just like with the music industry, people start looking for Australia for where the next person is, and a lot of Australians can get an international release on the back of it. It only takes one Midnight Oil within the science fiction field, and I think a lot of other people will get an international pressing of their fiction on the back of it, and that hasn't happened yet. Maybe when that happens it really will be a Golden Age.

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Letter

Dear Jeremy,

Congratulations on the last issue of lbn Qirtaiba, which I always enjoy very much. I especially enjoyed the feature on Twin Peaks. Could you do one on Wild Palms? I remember someone describing this weird and wonderful Oliver Stone miniseries as "Twin Peaks for the '90s". This is kind of odd, because Twin Peaks itself was from the '90s, but it is otherwise apt because both series tread the same fine line between SF and soap opera. Channel 9 showed Wild Palms just about as much respect as they show Star Trek The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine, by scheduling it for 11 pm at night, actually screening it at 11:15, and failing to promote it at all. (At least channels 7 and 10 have put Babylon 5 and seaQuest DSV on in prime time.) None of my friends have even heard of Wild Palms, and I haven't come across any merchandise. Maybe it never actually happened, and I've been taking too much Mimezine!

As for your editorial in the last issue, I too have been caught up in the recent communications craze, although I am more into the Internet than bulletin boards.

How about printing a list of FTP sites, newsgroups, chat groups and URLs relating to science fiction? They are easy enough to find once you know your way around, but I'm sure many readers would appreciate a concise listing.

I enclose an old advertisement that I found the other day, which reveals the startling fact that Night of the Living Dead and Doctor Who and the Daleks debuted in the States as a double bill! Only in America, I guess.

Gary Keable
Surfers Paradise, Queensland

Ed: Thanks for your kind comments and for the advertisement, which is reprinted opposite. I enjoyed Wild Palms also. But rather than composing a Worlds of Fandom on it, I have a better suggestion you compose one! As for merchandise, I know there is a book called The Wild Palms Reader and two videos entitled The Dream Begins and The Dream Concludes. And, of course, there are the original comic books on which the miniseries was based. Your idea for a feature on SF resources on the Intemet is a good one. I am something of a novice netsurfer myself, but I'll see what I can dig up.

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Serial: Other People's Flesh part, 4

The story so far: Mark Heydon was about to transmat from Perth to Singapore when the operator of the transmat started shooting at him. A fight ensued and Heydon accidentally killed her. He fled the scene in a panic. Meanwhile, apparently in Singapore, Heydon is questioned by the police about the shooting, which he claims to know nothing about. Back in Perth, Heydon escapes the scene of the crime and retreats to his favourite cafe. He there meets his other self and discovers that although the transmat transmitted him to Singapore, it did not destroy the original copy of his body in Perth. The other Heydon has been charged with murdering the transmat operator, and wears a bail bracelet which allows the police to track him. This Heydon tries to convince his counterpart to surrender to the police, but when this fails, he grabs a knife.

The other held his wrist out in front of his body, and slid the knife under the metal bracelet. With a sharp motion of his hand a red light on the bracelet began to flash, and the other's body slumped unconscious to the floor.

For a moment, Heydon stood paralysed. Then the noise of a police siren from several blocks away roused him into action. Pushing aside a waiter in his path, he bolted out of the cafe and fled into darkness. As the pitch and volume of the siren swelled he turned into a grimy alley, his heart pounding. He collapsed into a pile of cardboard boxes and wafted until the noise had gone. For the second time in twenty four hours Heydon found himself at a loss for what to do next. If what his other self had said was true, turning himself in to the police could well be a death sentence. Going home would be almost as risky. But he couldn't keep running forever; he had to tell someone what had happened. If his own flesh and blood didn't care, who else would listen to his story?

"Good evening, and welcome to Mike Carr Live, this 23rd day of November 2023. Tonight, we preview Prince William's shocking new unauthorised biography, a survivor of the San Francisco Massacre tells his tale, and we celebrate sixty years of a television legend. But first; two days ago, Mark Heydon stepped into a transmat cubicle in Perth and seconds later stepped out of another cubicle in Singapore. Nothing so unusual about that. But in a freak transmat malfunction, Mark didn't disappear from the cubicle in Perth. This means that there are now two identical copies of his body, one of which joins us now. Mark, is Perth big enough for the two of you?"

"I hope so, but we still have a lot of sorting out to do. It looks as if we're going to live separate lives, which means we'll have to divide up everything we have. Things are never going to be the same. For starters, I'm never going to use a transmat again."

"You must be annoyed with lnstransit for allowing this to happen," Mike Carr prompted,

"For saving my life? If the transmat hadn't malfunctioned I wouldn't be sifting here. I would be nothing more than a pile of ash by now."

"But you would still be alive in another body," the interviewer argued. Heydon shook his head.

"That other body would not be me. I have two bodies now, but only one of them is mine. This one. The moment my body was replicated in Singapore it became a new person. That didn't give Instransit a licence to kill my old body. It sickens me now to think of how many times I've been a party to the incineration of a living being, all for the sake of convenient transportation."

Mike had not been expecting this. "Surely if people are deconstituted in one place and reconstituted in another, and they feel that they are the same person, nobody is actually being killed."

"I disagree. I am a living, breathing, thinking human being. If you believe in that sort of thing, I have a soul. Could you kill me now, just because a copy of my body is walking around somewhere else?"

"Well if you put it that way, I suppose not," Mike tittered uncomfortably, "but getting onto a less morbid topic..."

"No," Heydon interjected, "let's stick with this topic. I've thought about what Instransit is doing a lot in the past couple of days, and I'm convinced that they're practicing genocide. Did you know that they had to get the law changed so that they could operate their machines? It used to be called murder to fry somebody with a laser. As far as anyone knows, it's a painless death. But nobody's been able to confirm it."

"Obviously you're very upset by what's happened...," Mike interrupted in a firm but calming voice.

"You're damn right I'm upset, and so should everyone else be. People have got to know what's happening to them whenever they use the transmat."

"Thanks for coming in Mark; I'm afraid we've run out of time."

Heydon ignored him. "Do you know what happens to the ashes? Each of us - everyone who has ever used a transmat - is a walking graveyard! We're made up of other people's flesh! Other people's snot, other people's bile, other people's shit!"

Mike Carr broke in hurriedly. "We'll take a break now and be right back." The lights dimmed and the presenter earnestly scribbled a zig-zag on the note-pad on his desk. The lights came up again, and he said "Oh, Christ."