The Drink Tank 287 (2011).pdf

Welcome to another Drink Tank and the

return to the 52 Weeks to Science Fiction Film

Literacy program! I’m always happy to be back

at my work and I really loved the movie that I’ll

be talking about. I was working on the Hugo for

Best Novel issue (which I really liked!) and then

on Westercon and other stuff.

Oh Yeah, Westercon. Let me start by say-

ing AWESOME! It was a really good time, even

though I wasn’t staying at the hotel and had to

trek in and out most nights. It was still a great

time, especially running the fanzine lounge. I

brought a ton of the zine collections and Mo

Starkey (who did this issue’s cover) brought a

bunch of her art and I was so happy to get to

show it off. We had a lot of great conversation

(including one with Leigh Ann, Espana and Un-

woman that was endlessly awesome) and I had

had the aforementioned Unwoman playing in

the Lounge on Saturday. She was so good, even

playing in front of about 20 people, she puts on

a helluva show. I’ve seen her playing in front of

hundreds of people and in front of a dozen and

she always puts out the big effort.

You might remember that I had a lovely

moment at the last Westercon I made it to, the

one in Vegas, where Bill Mills played Rocket Man

for me in a rotunda with only Roxanne Mills along

for the ride. This time, it was Unwoman playing

piano and singing for me and two or three oth-

ers. She played a song from V For Vendetta that

just blew me away. She was great and an absolute

highlight for me for Westercon 64.

The big news for many was what I called

the SMoFpocalypse!!!!! It all started with Kevin

and Andy starting a hoax bid to bring Westercon

66 in 2013 to a roadside place called Granzella’s.

I’ve been there and I posted a lot of comedy

stuff, but after a bit, they started taking the bid

as a more serious protest bid, which got a lot

of traction, especially from folks who would not

normally vote. The Portland bid, which had been

the only pre-announced bid and the only one

theoretically eligible to win, had done very little,

had been hit with life and couldn’t cope with it.

That led to a vote that saw it end up with Gran-

zella’s with 42 votes and Portland 41. A Hoax

bid had won, possibly for the ﬁrst time (The

legendary ‘Both’ vote may have got the most

votes, but we’ll never know) and that sent it to

the Business Meeting, which went on for three

hours and was an amazing amount of work. Kev-

in Standlee did an amazing job keeping it going

and in the end, it turned up with Kevin and Andy

getting Westercon 66. They’re looking at a place

in the Sacramento Valley. I hope I’ll get a chance

which I enjoyed, and a ton of Filk and other con-

certs. Westercon brought us Milt Stevens and

John Hertz and the three of us had a wonderful

conversation in the bar about Heinlein and sci-

ence ﬁction and art in general. It was great to get

a chance to ﬁnally hear a story that featured Di-

ana Vick about which I had heard spoken of only

as a shared-joke punchline from my peeps in the

Northwest. I even got a chance to sit down with

Ben Yalow and get some great SMoFish history.

Y’all know how much I love that!

SO, it was a good con, I had a lot of fun

and I’m running the Lounge for Seattle next

year, when Frank Wu, my dear friend and fellow

Minicon GoH next year, will be the Artist GoH!

Can’t wait for it!

WorldCon is looming and I’ve got so

much more to do! And with that in mind, away

we go!

to be on their commit-

tee, and I am certainly

going to be going!

Glenn Glazer

is a stud. He put on a

great Westercon, one

that was slightly rat-

tling around in the

Fairmont, which was a

great hotel, and he put

together a team that

put on a good con for

the fans to make the

most of. We had Match

Game SF, which was fun

as always, and we had

the Foglios doing Girl

Genius Radio Theatre,

For immediate release:

Announcing the creation of Bullshit! The Speculatively Fictitious Fanzine.

All and sundry are invited to take part in the inaugural issue of Bullshit! Fan

writing of all types is welcome and encouraged, with the single requirement that

the main thrust of the piece may not be true. It may be a bold-faced lie, a fabri-

cation, a tall tale, a ﬂight of fancy, an article of spurious logic, or a ﬁb.

Anything but the truth.

The Editor, however, shall reserve the right to reject material of a slanderous

nature.

Fan art, too, is welcome and encouraged, with the caveat that it may not be

in the creator’s own distinctive style. It may be of some material outside of the

artist’s milieu, an imitation of a well-known artist, or a parodic work. This should

be taken as an invitation to explore new territory, free from the conﬁnes of rep-

utation.

The Editor shall be known by the name of William Housel, and will receive

submissions at the electronic address of william.housel@gmail.com. The dead-

line for submissions to the initial issue of Bullshit! shall be Wednesday, the 14th

of September, 2011.

Letter Graded Mail

sent to garcia@computerhistory.org

by Our Gentle Readers

The Man Himself: Warren Buff!!!!

Hey, Chris and James!

Looks like another great special issue

from Chris & James! That cover’s brilliant – was

it one of the proposed logo designs for the Hu-

gos, or is it brand-new for this issue?

It was created for the Hugo Logo contest.

Every once in a while, I’ll ﬁnd one that had

been submitted and didn’t win. This one re-

ally struck me.

The pictures of book covers lining the

tops of several of your pages are a nice touch,

too – I enjoyed seeing what you included (though

I detect a paucity of 80s titles – any particular

reason for that?). There’s also some weird black

space on the table of contents page – are those

items you left off the listing? I notice the ﬁrst

thing it lists is on page 10.

Yeah, I didn’t ﬁnd as many 1980s covers as I’d

have liked. I was struck with just how awe-

some some of the covers were!

On the editorial, something occurred to

me about Chris’s well-known dislikes in novel-

ists – there’s a common thread to the ﬁction of

Heinlein and Bujold, and it seems to be the fast-

paced adventure story featuring a hero who is in

some way elite (Heinlein in particular seems to

have felt that only the elite would make it into

space). I have to wonder, Chris, if this is general

enough to extend to other, similar adventure

stories – are there other writers in this milieu

who similar bring the bile to the back of your

throat?

You may have a point, though I do enjoy some of

the Phillip Jose Farmer novels that would qual-

ify as adventure, and there’s the adventure stuff

from Hubbard which I’ve enjoyed, but it’s partly

that elite hero that annoys me.

Also, I wonder who this mysterious

reader with the metallic blue ﬁngernails is – I

recognize the background from Chris’s Drink

Tank Review of Books videos, but the person is

clearly someone else.

That’s Evelyn sitting in the heart of Drink Tank

Studios.

James and Niall point out some really in-

teresting sounding stuff in their articles about

novels that didn’t make the short-list, some of

it just too obscure or peculiar to make the cut,

some of it likely to be contained in the next

few didn’t-make-its. I confess to really not hav-

ing kept up with what’s in the running for the

Sidewise Award this year, so while several of the

books in that section of the article sound pretty

cool, I just don’t have context to judge.

There are a few things that James brought up

that I really wanna get a hold of. I have very nar-

row reading habits, it seems. I’ve gotta work on

that, I think.

Chris then takes a more methodical ap-

proach to possible nominees, looking at what

could have been replaced (my answer? Feed)

with what. The titles seem to be missing in this

section, as well, but they’re pretty self-evident

when you start reading. Since only one of the

novels felt to me like it just didn’t belong, I’ll fo-

cus on Chris’s suggestions for replacing it. I’d

have been rather satisﬁed to see Abraham Lin-

coln: Vampire Hunter on the ballot, though I

don’t think it would be a high-caliber winner, nor

would it stand a reasonable chance. The other

zombie novels you bring up are interesting, too,

though I’ve not read them. The other choices

that jump out to me as potentially interest-

ing nominees among your list are How to Live

Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, Shades of

Milk and Honey, Ark, and Terminal World. While

I deﬁnitely enjoyed Kraken, I don’t really think it

was as good as what did wind up on the ballot

(with the one already-stated exception).

I really wanna ﬁnish Shades of Milk & Honey be-

cause I love MRK’s writing and think that the

bit I’ve managed to ﬁnish was spectacular. The

card game she’s developed around it is awesome

too!

One thing I notice in the section on cov-

ers is more about me than about the other folks

who wrote in for that. For those who don’t

know, I live in the same county as Baen Books’

home ofﬁce, and thus see a whole ton of their

covers. I’ve grown pretty much immune to their

characteristic abuse of typefaces that some of

the other respondents pointed out. So when I

looked at the cover to Cryoburn, I really didn’t

notice the Impact text ﬂying at me. Weird blind

spot, that. I was also amused that I was from

“The South”, while most other folks were listed

with a city and larger body containing it (though

I think Flick was given a whole country).

Just read the latest issue of Dark Mat-

ter and they did an interview with a Book

Designer. That was a nice touch as everyone

focuses on the Cover Artists and as Cryo-

burn obviously shows, it’s the Designer who

has such an important role. And Warren

Buff, to me, IS the South!

At this point, it became apparent what

was going on with those missing items I com-

mented on earlier – my copy of Acrobat

Reader was crapping out. Given that this is

the case, and the remaining text of the issue

has become an illegible mess, I’m going to cut

this letter short, with apologies, but say that

I deeply enjoyed reading this issue (yesterday,

when Acrobat Reader was working). If found

it highly informative, and it gave me chances to

reconsider some of the works I’d read. One

disappointment is that no one picked up on

the coolest thing in The Dervish House – the

beautiful layering of microcosm-macrocosm

throughout the story, and the use of the sci-

ence ﬁctional elements to bring it even further

out. Ah, well – that’s what I get for not writing

it myself.

Warren Buff

I caught that a bit in my article about The

Dervish House and architecture, but I held

on to that for the McDonald issue that’s

coming up in the Fall. I think that’s an im-

pressive part of the story.

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