11.14.03

Whatever happened to the webzine Revolution SF? All links to http://www.revolutionsf.com stopped working some months ago, a situation which persists despite much protest to the site host. However, http://revolutionsf.com will get you there....

Neal Stephenson received an approving thumbs-up from Word magazine (December 2003): 'Neal Stephenson doesn't deal in science fiction -- what he writes is fiction with science in it.'

R.I.P. Dr Ernest Henry Taves (1916-2003), US psychoanalyst and co-author of the sceptical The UFO Enigma (1977), died on 16 August aged 87. His sf stories were published in Galaxy and If from 1969 to 1976. A tiny bibliographical point: he appeared in sf references as 'Ernest Keith Taves', his first Galaxy byline, but later sf story credits were to 'Ernest Taves' and Galaxy eventually profiled him as 'Ernest H.Taves, M.D.' My thanks to William Contento for sorting that out.

What Colour Were the Yellow Jackets on Your Planet? Terry Pratchett dropped a hint that he may have originated in an unfamiliar leg of the Trousers of Time, when reminiscing in the Daily Telegraph (4 Oct) about his early library reading: 'vast amounts of Gollancz science fiction in those virulent magenta and purple covers that you could spot across the entire length of the fiction section.'

Outraged Letters. Phyllis Gotlieb has bad news for J.G. Ballard (see Runcible 102). 'A National Geographic expedition found the source of the Amazon in December, 2000. It flows out of the Andes in southern Peru, from a mountain 18,363 feet high, called Nevado Mismi. (Information courtesy of Google.) You needn't tell J.G. Ballard if it will destroy his dream.'

Thog's Masterclass. Life in Ancient Mu Dept. 'Enormous birds as large as modern air liners were worshipped as symbols of the Old Ones. [...] Elephants and mastodons grew to a size that rivalled that of the dinosaurs of an earlier age. And in the sky hung an enormous moon, bluey white in colour, that counteracted the earth's gravity and caused the tremendous growth of all the living creatures of Mu.' (Colin Wilson, The Philosopher's Stone, 1969)

David Langford is an author and a gentleman. His newsletter, Ansible, is the essential SF-insider sourcebook of wit and incongruity. His most recent books are Different Kinds of Darkness, a new short-story collection of horror, SF, and fantasy, Up Through an Empty House of Stars: Reviews and Essays 1980-2002, 100 pieces of Langfordian genre commentary, and He Do the Time Police in Different Voices, a short-story collection that brings together, all of Dave's SF parodies and pastiches. (This is a scary thought. Are you ready to laugh that hard?)

Dave lives in Reading, England with his wife Hazel, 25,000 books, and a few dozen Hugo awards. He continues to add books and Hugos.