This a traditional letter column.
You are encouraged to write a letter of comment on anything that you
find worthy of comment. It will (may) be published in this column along
with my reply. As editor I reserve the right to delete material;
however I will not alter the undeleted material. E-mail to me that solely
references the contents of this site will be assumed to be publishable
mail. All other e-mail is assumed to be private. And, of course, anything
marked not for publication is not for publication. Oh yes, letters of
appreciation for the scholarly resources provided by this site will be
handled very discreetly. This page contains the correspondence for
September 2002.
NOTE: Between my trip, changing my site address, having my hard drive
crash, and other goodnesses, the August letter column never happened.
From: Sara C. Helterman
Yes, I’m bored at work. “Stewardesses” is the longest word you can type
with your left hand, dude.
From: LAURENT FLECHAIRE
I recently read your article on An ugly American in France. As a American
living in France I read this aloud to my French boyfriend and we were
dying laughing. I just wanted to say thanks for the great laugh and we
think you should add and update this site.
From: Joseph Eros
I ran across your wonderful web page when I followed a link to your article
on making up references. Then I ended up burning quite a bit of time
reading much of the rest of the content. The overall effect was something
like finding a whole series of books you like by an author you haven’t heard
of previously. Thanks very much.
I used to think that hyperobesity was something you only saw among
SF fans and circus freaks. Nowadays, however, it seems to be common
and, you should excuse the expression, spreading in the population.
Yr. obt. srvt.
Joseph Eros
From: ryan goetz
my son wants to become a mutations and i want him to becom one but how do
we do it pleas tell me i really need your help e mail me back ok thanks mr.
From: Charles Hitchcock
So you’re trying to make sure BLOOM COUNTY isn’t forgotten? (Or was
there a more sinister reason for repeating that joke?) Just think —
there are probably intelligent, well-read 16-year-olds who wouldn’t
get that one.
Forgive me, I’m feeling like a character in a Hugo Gernsback novel.
Index of contributors
Other Correspondence Pages
Date: 09/19/2002
Subj: The longest word.
You’re absolutely right; it is the longest word I can type with my left hand.
I suspect that matters would be different if I were Welsh.
Return to index of contributors
Date: 09/05/2002
Subj: France
Carma
It has been a while since I’ve read that, er, article. It is quite as funny
as you describe it as being. However I am not the author; it is merely one of
those things that circulates on the internet. My site is rather like a
sand bar in the flood stream of the internet, upon which bits of flotsam
and jetsam pile up.
Return to index of contributors
Date: 07/23/2002
Subj: Thanks for your web page, and further digressions
You’re welcome. That is the effect that I strive for.
Besides the fake references article, I also liked the book reviews and the
bit on the Fermi paradox. In your reading on financial criminals and other
conmen, have you found anything good on a guy named Reavis who managed to
claim ownership for a few years of a good chunk of Arizona? I came across
him in one of Jay Robert Nash’s compendia, but I’d like to get more details.
I originally came across James Addison Reavis (the Red Baron of Arizona)
in Rebels, Rogues & Rascals, a marvellous collection of articles about
famous frauds and hoaxes. I expect it is long out of print, having been
printed in 1961, so it’s unlikely that you will find a copy. In lieu of
that try http://pw1.netcom.com/~mikalm/reavis.htm . Incidentally, Vincent
Price played Reavis in The Baron of Arizona.
See http://us.imdb.com/Title?0042229
I also found your treatment of “The Cold Equations” to be a masterwork.
Never before have I read such a good summation of a Usenet debate. One
minor correction there: the Tintin book that involves death in space is not
called “Tintin on the Moon”; the English title is “Explorers on the Moon”
(or “On a Marche sur la Lune” in the original French except for lacking the
accent marks). Tintin is one of my own pet subjects of geekery, and I hope
you will forgive this pedantic turn.
Thank you for the correction.
Best of luck with your weight loss program, and hang in there. Americans
really are quite a bit fatter than anyone else (except for some Pacific
islanders I guess, but I’ve never been to those islands), a fact I did not
properly appreciate until I returned to the US after a yearlong absence in
Korea, followed by a trip back via China, Russia, and Western Europe. The
French and (especially) English were definitely fatter than the Chinese or
Koreans, but when I landed in New York I spent the next couple of days doing
periodic double-takes as some person massing as much as three average East
Asians came into view.
I progress; according to the BMI chart I am 2-3 pounds overweight. I would
like to lose another 10 to 15 pounds and remain at that weight. More
importantly, I would like to stay in shape and be in better shape. I have
been blessed with a quite servicable body that misleads the doctors into
thinking that I am much younger than I am. Let’s keep it that way, I
says to myself.
I hope the (fossil) dinosaurs continue to hove into view on a semi-regular
basis, and remain
I dare say the fossils will keep appearing. Worse yet, they keep
getting elected.
Return to index of contributors
Date: 09/04/2002
Subj: help me please
My suggestion is that you learn how to spell and how to punctuate. This won’t
help your son become a mutant (nothing will) but you will be a better person
for it.
Return to index of contributors
Date: 08/25/2002
Subj: august
Just so. Fortunately few well-read 16-year-olds read my ezine.
Topical jokes have their ups and downs; to pick two examples close
together, only G&S; fans and London historians know who Captain Shaw
was, but most Brits recognize Pickford’s as it’s still in business.
(The web tells me it got entangled with Allied sometime after I
photographed G&S; references in 1979, but the name is still on the
trucks.) One of my favorites is the joke that was extended to “and if
you’re People Express, it’s Tuesday.” — PE was the first casualty,
but none of the names (Eastern, TWA, Allegheny) in the version I
originally heard have survived.
This G&S; fan didn’t know who Captain Shaw was until you mentioned
him. Now I know, courtesy of the Universal Electronic Library. How
our lives have been enriched by this miracle of modern information
transfer; one can only imagine the awe that our ancestors would have
had if they could have beheld it.
re plumbing: so you get the plumbing torn up while you’re in the
house, then come visit us “hostile, suspicious, costive and
clannish” Easterners (Damon Knight’s description) after it’s all
done? Sounds backwards to me….
Even so. Still, if I had gone East whilst the dirty work was being
done you may be sure that it would not have been done when I returned.
Plumbers hereabouts usually have a number of jobs going on at once;
work on your job tends to slow down markedly if you aren’t speaking
to them regularly. As it is, the urinal still hasn’t arrived from
the distributor. (In case I didn’t mention it, I’m having a urinal
put in.) It seems that it is a special order because the fixtures are
an off white color. I have fond hopes that this last bit of business
will be completed before the Xmas holidays.
(Davey contracted to have her kitchen overhauled during our first
major trip together. At one point a subcontractor let the cat out, and
a friend who stayed home and kept an eye on the work went around the
neighborhood calling for it. In an area on the athletic side of BU, is
anyone surprised that on every porchful of young men there was at
least one who looked up at a woman’s voice calling “Stoooooopid!”?)
Not at all. The surprise comes in with learning that the woman is
calling for a cat.
IMO, the confusion of “The Little Black Bag” and “The Marching
Morons” (in “Now what was that story”) isn’t unreasonable; Kornbluth
wasn’t into Future History in general, but these two stories have a
future in common, even if it’s just a setup in tLBB and the plot
driver in tMM.
I seem to recall that he used it in a couple of other stories as well.
It’s interesting to note how old these stories are — without
references the only one I’d place after 1960 is “Light of Other Days”.
(The Bixby was televised later, but it was published in STAR SF #2.)
Did the people on rasfw all grow up raiding libraries? (Libraries tend
to Good Old Stuff — I once wrote a term paper based almost entirely
on editors’ forwards from anthologies from libraries.) Or are they
just antiques like us? Or have there not been any striking shorts
since then? I can’t produce any similarly striking stories from since
then — but I’d read most of your list at a more impressionable age
(“The Golden Age of SF is 12”).
One factor is that they have all been reprinted numerous times.
The older the story, the more chances it had to have reprinted. More
subtly, short story anthologies aren’t as popular as they used to be.
The newer stories have less exposure. Be that as it may, there have
been some striking stories since the old days. What about “The
Screwfly Solution”?
PS: nitpicky proofreading note: the title is
“– And He Built a Crooked House”
(added word, quotes, emdash confirmed by James Gifford’s extensive
Heinlein site)
Are you saying that there is something wrong with my poorfreading?
… continued on next rock …
An excellent point — marketroids believe that reprint anthologies don’t sell (perhaps excepting best-of-last-year), which tends to be a self-fulfilling prophecy. (cf NESFA picking up the retrospective bests by Greenberg/Silverberg.) Old anthologies are also findable on used-book tables; I haven’t seen the new ones as much.
The bit about old anthologies being findable is interesting. Why, I wonder, is that? Perhaps it is simply a matter of the old ones having gone through more printings. Then again, used book stores acquire a lot of their stock from estates. Older people will have the older books.I would have picked “The Women Men Don’t See” over your Tiptree, for quality and because it may have occasioned the remark Silverberg most wishes he could take back (about “Tiptree” having to be male because the writing was “ineluctably masculine”). I’d also point to “Bones of the Earth”, which came in second in this year’s Hugos.
I haven’t read “Bones of the Earth”. I have read “The Women Men Don’t See” but for some reason for me it is utterly forgettable. The title is striking but I have no idea at all what the story is about.But certainly there are some striking stories coming out. A question is how many; editors have been whinging for decades that too many people think they can start by writing novels, which leads to mountains of extra-bulky slush and a shortage of good pieces for the magazines (where most of the classic writers learned their craft). (There’s also supply-and-demand here, of course — there was almost no paperback SF then, and a magazine would have room for up to 100 shorter pieces and 3-4 novels in a year.) Countering this, there are now lots of dreadful original anthologies — I’ve been told the DAW lines operate by announcing a topic and closing the book when enough pages have come in (no editorial selection at all), but I don’t know that I entirely/ believe this….
I am told that the magazine slush piles are as large as ever. Oddly enough there still seems to be a shortage of good shorts. Either that or the editors cannot recognize good short fiction when they see it.Return to index of contributors
From: Patricia Wadley
Date: 09/09/2002
Subj: necro et ale
I loved it. And don’t I have a book or so by you?
I’m pleased you liked it. You don’t have a book by me. However there is a Richard Harter who is a serious academic type; you might have a book by him.Return to index of contributorsIn the midst of life I am gathering a book, so you may well will have read a book by me, but not just yet.
From: Campos850
Date: 09/03/2002
Subj: New come Volleyball Rules
I need information on how to play New come Volleyball.
I’m sorry but I don’t recognize “New come”. Might you be speaking by any chance of rally point scoring, which has become the standard in high school volleyball?Return to index of contributors
This page was last updated September 21, 2002.
It was reformatted and moved November 29, 2005.