Is what happens when you wake up at 3:30 am, open up your reader and your blog and discover:
File 770 linked in to the blog. This is Mike Glyer’s famous fanzine (now in electronic form here and here and really here) about fandom and fannish news.
If I weren’t in the process of moving, I’d be busily scanning a copy or two of the printed, 30 some-odd years old versions and putting them up here to give you all some idea of exactly what a fanzine really looks like (not to mention an idea of exactly how long Mike has been doing this).
BoingBoing mentions are all well and good and far-reaching and instantaneous and all, but a mention in File 770 is like, history man. ” – I mean, I’m no, I can’t – I’m a little man, I’m a little man, he’s, he’s a great man.” (Dennis Hopper, Apocalypse Now)
Maybe Linda Bushyager will resurrect Karass (I’ve got copies of that too to scan) and mention me in there too…
Then there’s this via BoingBoing: Copyright Renewal Notices Now Online
Way cool. (Repeat after me) “If I wasn’t moving today” I’d be typing a whole mess of titles into the search engine to check their status.
This has the potential of at least doubling the size of the print section of The Classic Science Fiction Channel. Speaking of which:
The guy who maintained Phil’s Old Time Radio site over at Multiply.com has disappeared. Right after I requested that he let me link directly to the radio show episodes he hosted over there (the ones you can’t play on The Classic Science Fiction Channel site). I copied most of them down to my system and am going to upload to the server and launch them directly from the site, but some I didn’t copy and if Phil doesn’t re-surface, I may not be able to provide active links. If anyone knows where Phil is, please get in touch.
To return to File 770 for a moment: I’d have done a more visual presentation of Hugo Voting methods – if I wasn’t moving.
I also failed to mention SF Awards Watch, which just so happens to have a link to an article by Glyer currently running, which concerns predicting the Hugo winner for best novel and the divergence between the Locus Award, the Neblua and the Hugo. Mike invites speculation as to why this is.
A lack of sweeps (winning all three) – I have no idea. On the other hand: 29 of the 37 Hugo winners since 1971 (the first year all three awards were given out) have won two of those awards. So its a pretty good bet that either the Locus or Nebula winner will be taking home a Hugo, which means that this year either The Yiddish Policeman’s Union or The Yiddish Policeman’s Union has, based on historical statistics, a better than 78% chance of winning.
On the other hand, Brasyl, Rollback, The Last Colony and Halting State (the other novel nominees – which doesn’t mean unusual nominees, it signifies length in this case) are all being given away as a free ebook (to current WSFS members), while TYPU is not. Hmmm.
No, the authors of those books are not ganging up on Chabon in an attempt to skew the vote. They just weren’t able to get permission to distribute a free e-copy. (Rigggggght…, lol)
I could easily continue to do a second info dump at this time, more neat stuff (nifty keen even) keeps flooding in every second, but I have to stop somewhere, so I’ll close with these programming notes: I’m busily setting up internally hosted files of the “bad links” on the radio show section of TCSFC site, but today Comcast will be moving my service access from the old house to the new house, so these fixes may take some time.
