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OtherRealms Issue 17 Part 04
Electronic OtherRealms #17
July, 1987
Part 4
Stuff Received
Books
Ace/Putnam
Farmer, Philip Jose. Dayworld Rebel, 317 pages, $17.95. Sequel to
Dayworld.
Avon Science Fiction
Baker, Sharon. Journey to Membliar, 247 pages, $3.50.
Zelazny, Roger. Blood of Amber, 215 pages, $3.50. Sequel to Trumps of
Doom now in paperback, second (of five) books in the second Amber
Trilogy. Highly recommended.
Bantam Fantasy
Ryman, Geoff. The Unconquered Country, 131 pages, $2.95. 1985 British
and World Fantasy awards winner, first U.S. edition. Reviewed
in OR 13, highly recommended.
Bantam
Science Fiction
Cook, Paul. On the Rim of the Mandala, 246 pages, $3.95.
McQuay, Mike. Memories, 400 pages, $3.95.
Tyers, Kathy. Firebird, 265 pages, $3.50. A first novel.
Space and Time
138 West 70th St. (4B)
New York, NY 10023
Mayhay, Ardath. The Wall, 121 pages, $6.95. Mystery/horror cross
genre novel.
Tor
Fantasy
Cook, Glen. Reap the East Wind, 213 pages, $2.95. A new Dread
Empire novel.
Norton, Andre and Miller, Phyllis. House of Shadows, 250 pages, $2.95.
Reprint of a 1984 novel.
Springer, Nancy. Madbond, 214 pages, $2.95. Book 1 in the Sea King
Trilogy.
Tor
Horror
Campbell, Ramsey. The Hungry Moon, 360 pages, $4.50. First
American printing.
Farris, John. The Uninvited, 276 pages, $3.95. Reprint of a 1982 novel.
Monteleone, Thomas F. The Magnificent Gallery, 248 pages, $3.95.
Tor
Science Fiction
Anderson, Poul. Past Times, 288 pages, $2.95. Reprint of a 1984 novel.
Pournelle, J. E. Guns of Darkness, 406 pages, $3.95. There Will Be
War, Volume VI, an Anthology series.
Saberhagen, Fred. Berserker Base, 316 pages, $3.95. An anthology of
Berserker stories. First mass market printing.
Fan and
Other Zines
The Dillinger Relic 52. Arthur D. Hlavaty, editor. Bi-monthly, $1/issue
or trades from 819 W. Markham Ave, Durham, NC 27701.
Ouroboros 6. Erskine Carter, editor. Fiction and Poetry magazine.
Subscriptions $12.00/4 issues from University Publications, The
University of Connecticut, Storrs, Connecticut. Also
available: The Rock Pile, a poetry collection by Eddie
Robbert. No pricing information given.
Robert Sheckley will be signing at Dark Carnival, 2812 Telegraph
Avenue, Berkeley, Ca 94705 on June 11 from 6-8PM. Piers Anthony will
sign June 10 from 6-8PM and Persia Wooley on June 13 from 2-4PM. For
more information, call (415) 845-7757.
The Other Change of Hobbit, Berkeley, CA 94704, celebrated their 10th
anniversary of existence on Saturday, June 6th.
Ace Books has scheduled publication of Dave Smeds sequel to The Sorcery
Within for the Fall of 1989. This is the first indication that, despte
Ace's comments that the coming Ace/Berkley merge would only affect
reprints, new books are being delayed, sometimes with devastating
effect. Realistically, how many people are going to be interested in
waiting three years for the sequel of a book? Worse, since Smeds is a
new (and very talented, I might editorialize) writer, this delay has
cut his writing income, forcing him to take a mundane job for the time
being. It seems to me that Smeds has gotten a raw deal here, and I hope
some other publisher is smart enough to make sure that his next book
comes out under another imprint where his talents will be appreciated.
The delay also seems to imply that Ace/Berkley has excess inventory --
is it possible, with all of the other mergers and problems SF publishers
have seen, that we're on our way into a down-cycle in publishing?
The paperback rights to Clare Bell's books Ratha's Creature and Clan
Ground have been sold to Dell, who will publish the first volume this fall.
Joel Rosenberg has signed a two book contract with Ace for An Acrobat
of D'shar, a Fantasy Murder Mystery, and its untitled sequel. The agent
was Eleanor Wood, and Beth Fleisher will be editing. Also, Not For
Country, Not for King has been rescheduled as a March hardcover instead
of an April paperback. It is also going to have the title changed.
C.S. Friedman's In Conquest Born has been bought by the Science Fiction
Book Club as a Main Selection this fall.
Letters to OtherRealms
Chuq:
There are persistent rumours that lots of Americans who are attending
the Worldcon are coming to Europe earlier this summer. For those who
want to see Scandinavia I've got a great offer.
Attend Intercon, the biggest Scandinavian con this year! (Well, we may
get 400 people -- fandom is still pretty small around here; on the
other hand, that is one Norwegian in 10,000)
The Con is July 10 - 12, and non-Scandinavian residents get in for
free. GOHs are Stephen Donaldson, M. John Harrison, and Norwegian
Thore Hansen. There will be an art show, masquerade, filmes, dealers'
tables, a RuneQuest tournament, rock concert and many other activities.
This is your opportunity to meet Norwegian and Swedish fans -- very
nice people indeed!
The Convention will be held at the University of Oslo, so there is no
official convention hotel. There are lots of good hotels in Oslo, or
you can stay with a fellow fan. Camping is also a possibility.
Visitors who are unable to attend the Intercon but would like to see
Oslo anyway are welcome to contact us. We can arrange accommodations
and entertaining company for visiting fans. Drop us a line either at my
address or at Intercon, C/O Egil Haraldson Stenseth, Thv. Meyersgt. 45,
N- 0555 Oslo 5 Norway.
Come and see us, won't you?
Heidi Lyshol
Maridalsvn. 235 A
N-0467 Oslo 4
Norway
[An offer I wish I didn't have to refuse, but my schedules
don't allow me to be in Europe that long -- this time. Now,
once I get to be a rich, best selling author.... Seriously, if
you're going to take an extended tour in Europe, this looks
like a good way to see a fascinating part of the world and meet
folks with similar interests at the same time. If you can be
there, drop them a line. -- chuq]
Chuq;
Thanks as usual for OtherRealms. I enjoyed it quite a bit, as usual,
and find it useful. In the context of generally praising you, I would
like to strongly request that when books are mentioned in articles,
such as John Wenn's "Non-Western Mythologies in Fantasy" piece, full
information be given as to publisher, copyright date, publication date,
and price/format, if not ISBN#. I'm sure there must be others besides
myself who feel that this would add immensely to the usefulness of
these mentions.
Thanks for the mention of the Henderson books. We all love them from
out childhood, but they can use all the publicity they can get for the
reissue, considering how long ago they were done, and that she is
hardly in the public eye, being dead.
I could kill Terry Carr for leaving us, and removing my role model from
a phone call away to a place rather harder to communicate with. I do
hope, however, that he was only the first book editor to win a Best
Editor Hugo, not the only one forever. If you want to do a public
service, you could run a list of who is at what house; the info is
available in the Locus and Science Fiction Chronicle Market Reports.
I'm surprised to see that Paul Chisholm doesn't recognize Terry's
accomplishments from the 1960's and 1970's. Did Ben Bova really
publish better material than The Left Hand of Darkness; Pavane; The
Year of the Quiet Sun; Other Days, Other Eyes; the other Specials, and
all of the other books Ace bought, like Chip Delaney, Dune, Le Guin,
Zelazny, etc.? Terry has been professionally influential in Science
Fiction from the early 1960's, and his fan work has influenced fans
from the mid-1950's.
The size of the loss the field has suffered from Terry's death is
measured by the fact that only a few people are sufficiently well-rounded
enough to know just how many areas Terry was active in and how large
his accomplishments were. I, and others, will be painfully missing him
for years: at conventions, for lack of a phone call, a fanzine, a
grammatical quibble, a gently acerbic right-on observation. Godfuckingdamn.
Here's for more frequent and larger OtherRealms.
Sincerely,
Gary Farber
Avon Books
[[I agree with the need for more complete information. Not all
of the material submitted to me has all of the information, and
I don't always have the time or resources to track it down. It
becomes a footrace between getting the material published on a
timely basis (and getting OtherRealms out on time) and getting
it complete. Hopefully, the conversion to quarterly will give
me enough time to polish up some of these details I've had to
leave hanging in the past. Submitters can do me a big favor if
they include the following information for the books they're
discussing: title, author, publisher, copyright date,
publication date, price, type of book, and ISBN, or as much of
that material as they can get.
Another related thing that isn't happening due to lack of time
that I want to do is make sure that when a paperback edition of
a hardcover comes out that some kind of note about a previous
review is made. This is another project on hold due to time
that I hope to have running for the Winter issue.
I can't recommend the Zenna Henderson People books enough. If
you haven't read them, read them. I'm very glad to see them
coming back into print, and while the word classic is terribly
overused, nothing less qualifies for these works.
The loss of Terry Carr is going to affect the field
significantly, more than I think any of us realize. He was our
future -- a hell of an editor, but someone who never lost the
rocket in the back pocket or the gleam in his eye. He was
always searching out the next crack in the ghetto walls --
which many people do, but never with the consistent success
that Terry had. I want to echo something Marta Randall said
about Terry at Baycon, though: that Terry really isn't gone.
He is in our minds and in our hearts, and that his legacy will
carry on with us. When you write your next book, write it
believing that Terry is standing over your shoulder, clucking
his tongue and wagging his finger, and if you write the way you
feel an editor like Terry demanded of you, you'll deliver your
best work -- the kind of work both you and Terry could be proud of.
-- chuq]]
I am writing to you because I find your Electronic OtherRealms very
enjoyable reading. I am on the usenet, uucp, ... networks and get your
magazine from the news system. You mentioned that your readership is
around 3200 from usenet readers. How did you get that number? From what
I know about the network, any news site can pick up the news feed and
transmit it to other sites (on and off the usenet network). Thus news
does get onto many workstations as well as larger machines. Once the
news is on the machine, it is virtually impossible to tell actually how
many people do read each article. I consider your 3200 a very
conservative estimate, unfortunately I can't give you a better
estimate. I would be proud of your electronic readership, you put a
very worthwhile magazine on the network. As for me, I print it off and
take it to my parents when I go visiting. My mother really likes the
reviews and the stories. The next time she visits Palo Alto, she plans
on visiting Future Fantasy again and pick up a printed copy of OtherRealms.
As for the technology for including pictures with your electronic
version it could be done now. You could digitize the pictures and
convert them into a format that could be transmitted with the magazine
and then reformatted into the picture. There are several formats the
pictures could be transmitted in. If the people that read EOR have a
laser printer then pic format would work fine, if they have a Unix
system then plot format would also work, otherwise you are limited by
the ascii characters. As for getting it into pic/plot format a
digitizer could work or a graphics editor could work fine. I'm sure a
crude ascii picture would thrill readers enough. The drawback is that
not all your readers are going to have access to the same type hardware
devices to print the pictures.
Another thing, I started reading your magazine at volume 12. What would
be the chances of getting the first 11 issues?
Thank you again for creating a very worthwhile electronic magazine.
Victor Riley
Tektronix CASE Division
tektronix!copper!victorr
[[3,200 is a very conservative estimate. From what I can tell,
my total readership might be as high as 5,000, but because of
the uncertainty of statistic gathering on the various computer
networks I distribute through, I feel I have to keep to numbers
I feel comfortable justifying.
There are many reasons why the electronic version is text-only.
Some of them are technical; one good reason is that there is no
generally available and standard formats for transferring
picture data around electronically -- what works for some Unix
systems don't work on others; PC systems look at things another
way, Macintoshes (my machine) look at things entirely
different. While there are glimmers of hope on the horizon
(Postscript and my company's extensions of it in NeWS, for
instance) they are only glimmers, and I won't get involved in
that sort of stuff until a large enough percentage of my
electronic readers can benefit. That's, frankly, far enough
away that I'm not worrying about it.
Another thing is that the scanning resolution simply isn't good
enough for me -- 300dpi (dots per inch) is all you can
realistically get, and I don't believe that is good enough --
this is why I still paste art into OtherRealms rather than scan
it for the hard copy version. Artists put hard work into making
pictures that are pleasant to look at; it isn't reasonable for
me to ruin that in the reproduction process because it makes my
job a little easier. Maybe when scanners and printers are
running at 600dpi or above I'll reconsider it, but I don't
believe I can do artwork justice with the currently available
technology. It just isn't good enough.
Finally, there is a lot of work put into the art and the layout
of OtherRealms. If I posted an electronic version of that work,
people wouldn't have a reason to subscribe to the hardcopy. I'm
not trying to profit from the printed version, but it would be
nice if it broke even eventually (or came close, for that
matter -- OtherRealms costs me about $150/issue these days) and
I don't want to put myself in a position where I feel I'm
competing with myself. If you're interested in the text, the
electronic version will serve your purpose. If you're
interested in the rest, however, you have to read the printed
edition. -- chuq]]
I agree: Judy-Lynn Del Rey was a molder of what SF has become, and
needs to be remembered as such. Less than twenty years ago, the common
wisdom was that novellas were the genre's perfect medium. Now, the best
and most exciting work in the field usually turns up in novels, and SF
is getting more of the commercial and critical acclaim that it deserves.
Even as SF fans turn their attention to writers of novels, they've
ignored editors of novels. Terry Carr introduced a new generation of SF
writers with the revived Ace Specials, and Ms. Del Rey devoted her life
to encouraging SF novelist, and both were consistently passed up for
Best Editor Hugo's in favor of magazine writers. Now Ms. Del Rey is
gone, and it's too late to thank her for what she's done.
I don't know how I'd support a Del Rey Award for Best Novel, except
maybe to buy the winning work sight unseen. And I don't know who would
be right to give such an award. (Lester Del Rey and Del Rey books seem
the only reasonable source, but do you want them to judge novels they
publish against the competition? That's putting them in a serious
conflict of interest.) But Judy-Lynn Del Rey's books are too disassociated
from her name to be an ideal memorial, and we sorely need one.
-Paul S. R. Chisholm
psc@lznv.att.com
[[I've been thinking about this a lot recently, and having just
lost another great editor in Terry Carr, I've come to realize
that the contributions made by editor's is simply not
recognized by the general public. My current thought is that an
award celebrating Judy-Lynn Del Rey should be given to a member
of the publishing community for their contributions to the
field. I believe this award needs to be a panel award as well
-- the general public simply can't be aware enough of the
entire field to see what an editor is contributing.
If there is enough interest, I'd be willing to set this up,
although I still feel that this award needs to be sponsored by
a major convention to give it some legitimacy. The panel I'd
suggest would be the people that watch the industry year round
-- the reviewers. For the initial panel, I'd hope to get A.J.
Budrys (Fantasy & SF Magazine), Baird Searles (Isaac Asimov's
SF Magazine), Tom Easton (Analog), Debbie Notkin (Locus) and
Don D'Ammassa (Science Fiction Chronicle). There are a number
of names in publishing that I see pop up constantly in my
watching the field, names the average reader probably aren't
aware of, but which to me are an indication of quality and
(more importantly) consistency. Beth Meacham at Tor is
publishing what I feel is the highest quality line of books in
the industry -- over 10 books a month, and rarely a clunker.
Anything that comes out from Tor these days is likely to be a
good book to read, for which Beth deserves most of the credit.
The Wollheims (Don, Betsie and Elsie) at DAW books are
publishing some of the most innovative and risky books in the
industry -- major advertising pushes for first novels, for
instance, that might have languished on the midlist elsewhere.
They're taking chances nobody else is doing, and they're making
it work. Expect the best new voices to be coming from DAW in
the next few years. David Hartwell at Arbor House and James
Frenkel at the late Bluejay Books have also published a lot of
good, innovative material. These folks rarely get the credit
they deserve, preferring rather to stand in the sidelines and
enjoy watching their authors succeed. I hope we can do
something to let these folks know we appreciate their work.
-- chuq]]
Hello, Chuq!
I'm writing this by way of follow-up to my review on the folk group
Golden Bough that appeared in OR #3. Chatting with them at a concert, I
learned many readers followed my suggestion and ordered albums, and to
them and others who are interested in modern folk ("fantasy set to
music") I direct the following.
GOLDEN BOUGH ON CD!
Succumbing to the pleas of their fans, the folk group Golden Bough has
released their new album, Winding Road in album, cassette and CD
format! Winding Road continues in the tradition of highest quality
evident in the group's other three albums (Winter's Dance, Boatman's
Daughter, and Flight of Fantasy), mixing sounds and themes traditional
and quite modern.
Reappearing is "The Wizard," an evocative and complex tune. The balance
of voice and instrument, lively and contemplative, is excellent, more
than an equal match for the big name folk groups such as The Chieftains
and Silly Wizard, and augmented by the recording quality of West German
engineering. If you distrust my prejudicial praise, my husband
discussed Golden Bough with a vendor at BayCon. At the close of the
conversation Russ asked, "Would you recommend any other groups as
equivalent or better?" The vendor glanced over his extensive stock and
shook his head. "Nope."
For those of you just discovering Golden Bough, my highest
recommendations go to Winding Road and Boatman's Daughter, with Flight
of Fantasy and Winter's Dance just a nose behind. Golden Bough, their
first recording (available only on cassette), is farther down the list.
Although it shows the potential of the later recordings and contains
some very lovely music (The Wizard and Green Fields of France in
particular), it lacks the vitality and soul that raise the later four
above the crowd. If you can't find Golden Bough in your friendly
record store, write the group directly at:
Golden Bough
P.O.Box 11288
Oakland, CA 94611.
Currently available are: Winding Road [****] album/cassette/CD,
Boatman's Daughter [****] album/cassette, Flight of Fantasy [****]
album/cassette, Winter's Dance [****] album/cassette, Golden Bough
[***-] cassette only, Songs & Stories from Norway [***-] cassette only
[A solo cassette from Lief, featuring music and song from Norway, as
well as a humorous folk tale. I think I would enjoy it rather more if I
understood Norwegian], Troubador; Songs & Poems [I haven't seen this,
but the flier describes it as "a songbook of original compositions by
Paul Espinoza, from the Golden Bough recordings; The Wizard, Black Jack
Davy, etc., along with poems, illustrations & beautiful calligraphy."]
Enjoy!
Barbara Jernigan
barb@oliveb.ATC.OLIVETTI.COM
OtherRealms #17
July, 1987
Copyright 1987 by Chuq Von Rospach.
All Rights Reserved.
One time rights have been acquired from the contributors.
All rights are hereby assigned to the contributors.
OtherRealms may be reproduced in its entirety only for
non-commercial purposes. No article may be reprinted without
the express permission of the author.
