Cheap Truth

$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$ CHEAP TRUTH Special Unnumbered Edition $0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0 STURGEON: MERCURY PLUS X Sturgeon? The name was magnetic. There it was, perpetually cropping up attached to the stories I most admired. Sturgeon: quite an ordinary Anglo-American word among exotics like A. E. Van Vogt, Isaac Asimov, Heinlein, Simak, and Kuttner. Yet - spikey, finny, ODD. And it was not his original name. Theodore Hamilton Sturgeon was born Edward Hamilton Waldo. To the usual boring undeserving parents. That was on Staten Island, the year the first World War ended. So there were two of him, as there are...

THE LAST CHEAP TRUTH "NODE ZERO" DEMOLISHED! Omniaveritas shot! (Austin, Texas November 1986) "Node Zero," the global info-nexus of the CHEAP TRUTH publishing empire, has been reduced to smoldering wreckage in a poorly-realized action-sequence right out of the worst tradition of macho adventure fiction. A dead Hollywood stunt-dummy, with several burst squibs of chicken-blood attached to its head and torso, was discovered by hard-boiled investigators. The body has been identified as that of CHEAP TRUTH editor Vincent Omniaveritas. Credit for the attack was immediately claimed in phone-calls to a fictional news service where guys wear snap...

EDITORIAL . How stands the Empire? In this special issue, we publish the first results of our mystic quest for truth and Vimto. First, a guest writer presents a very typically British threnody on the state of culture here on Airstrip One. FAULT-LINE SKIRMISHING by Phaedrus We're too damn polite we British. Culturally, we are a mixed bag -- everything from the most rabid Scots and Welsh Nationalists to the Little Englanders. And yet the country is not shuddering with murmurs of revolt or even reverberating to the roars of mass demonstrations outside 10 Downing Street. And this despite 4 million unemployed. Why? Politeness has a lot to...

EDITORIAL . Science fiction today is in a rare state of ferment. This happy situation has been created only with great effort and must now be prolonged and intensified. In this issue, guest agitatrix Hunilla de Cholo addresses her fellow Eighties writers, with a moving lecture on pluralistic Postmodern solidarity. We at CHEAP TRUTH echo her sentiments. We also regard much of her literary analysis as rank deviationist heresy. All the better -- honest controversy sheds light on truth. And in the meantime, we can use the heat to bring SF to a boil. We are pleased to offer her this podium. REPORT ON THE SOPHOMORE CLASS DRESS CODE by Hunilla ...

EDITORIAL by Todd Refinery. Regular CT editor V. Omniaveritas is currently out of touch in Haiti, where he is pelting the Tonton Macoute with concrete blocks. And longtime CT contributor Sue Denim has our passports ready for a romantic tour of her own. CHEAP TRUTH TOURS CENTRAL AMERICA with Sue Denim The current chaos in Central America is the result of foreign meddling, greed, laziness, guilt, and misplaced idealism. That's a lot of factors, but then, Central America is a hell of a mess. So is this year's Nebula ballot. What happened? Take an area -- say, Central America, or the SFWA -- that has traditionally been governed by enl...

EDITORIAL : SF notions dominate the current Geneva arms talks. In this issue, CHEAP TRUTH responds to the zeitgeist. POP AGITPROP Since its unlikely birth, SF has been a trash medium, its appeal restricted to a subcultural faithful. But that appeal is widening and is being culturally legitimized. With the advent of the Strategic Defense Initiative, the elements, themes, and modes of thought native to science fiction have become central to worldwide political debate. One SF splinter group has shown a laudable quickness in grasping SF's new political potential. Unlike traditional SF "movements" this group of writers is not marked by li...

Award-winning writer, critic, and CHEAP TRUTH shill Candace Berragus, who remembers the 1950's personally, turns the skeptical eye of experience upon her chosen target: PUNK POSTURES Now that NEUROMANCER has garnered so many accolades, maybe it's time to sit back and see just what heights have been climbed. The book has, yeah, STYLE -- that gritty fascination with surfaces signalled by the opening line, "The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel." Wonderful! TV as symbol for numbed reflexes, anomie, pollution, savage commercialism. And that slick style carries us forward on a garbage-reeking tide ...

SF WRITER EATS OWN FOOT TO SURVIVE! Sci-fi writer Russell M. Griffin, after a succession of poorly-marketed novels, each from a less successful publisher than the one before it, last week devoured his own foot in order to stay alive. Griffin was unavailable for comment, but our sources conjectured, "How else is the poor b*st*rd supposed to live? Not on the piece-of-sh*t advances these people pay!" What brought Griffin to this end? Inquiring minds want to know. The seeds are visible in his first novel, THE MAKESHIFT GOD (Dell, 1979). Obviously some sort of effete intellectual snob, Griffin packs an otherwise well-written and fast-paced sp...

HOW THE OTHER HALF READS THE DAY LASTS MORE THAN A HUNDRED YEARS by Chingis Aitmatov, translator John French, Indiana University Press, 1983. People in the Soviet Union still have a nineteenth-century allegiance to the printed word. Authors are major public figures. Poets recite to packed soccer stadiums. Classic works of Russian literature are available, and their lack of Marxist ballast makes them seem vividly energetic and relevant. In the Soviet Union you can be a 'literary intellectual,' and no one will grin and ask what you REALLY do. You can get a license for it, and join the Writer's Union, and the State will pay you ...

EDITORIAL . Ghettos are insular places. The antics of ghetto elders or sinister youth gangs may assume absurd importance to a degraded and indigent populace. In their wretched haste to eke out a living, they may forget that the outside world exists. This is modern SF's predicament. Extrapolations, that once held some intellectual validity, have now become distorted folk tales, passed down through generations. SF's vision of the future has become a Punch and Judy show, ritualized, predictable, and fit only for children. This is not due to latter-day decadence. It is the result of a profound terror of the future and what it holds, ...