B0t#1
b0t#1
Edited by Grant Stone
All articles copyright 2010 by their respective authors. Published by permission of the authors
Cover art by Ashley Storrie
Design and layout by Mark S. Deniz
Typeset in Garamond and Times New Roman
****
Welcome to b0t
If you're reading this then you've managed to find the website, download the epub and get it to your ebook reader thing. Welcome.
This is b0t. It's an epub-only fanzine. Not the first one - that would be iKinook Reader. But it could well be the second.
I've got an iPod Touch that travels with me everywhere. It's turned out to be the way I'm consuming most of my media now. Music, podcasts, movies and comics in my pocket - see, I still think it's just a little bit magic. Not in that fatuous magic that Steve Jobs wants us to believe in (Sorry Steve, but an iPad's just another device). But I'm old enough to remember when the notion of a computer that would fit in your pocket really was science fiction. Now the computer in my pocket holds my science fiction.
I've been reading fanzines for a while now. And of course I help out behind the scenes at StarShipSofa. But I couldn't help wondering why the sofa was the only fanzine that I could carry around on the iPod with me. I don't know if you've noticed, but PDFs on an iPod really suck.
I've been a coder ever since I learned to type
10 print hello
20 goto 10Back on an Apple II. And when a coder wants something that's not available? Well they just go ahead and make it themselves. So this is the fanzine I want to read.
There's a theme of origin stories running though this issue, which is entirely appropriate. John Klima, Fábio Fernandes and Jeremiah Tolbert go back to when they first became fans. Mark Deniz and Kit O'Connell write about important music. And Matthew Sanborn Smith does what he always does - he's written a story that will make you punch the air as if you were in the first row of a Springsteen show.
I'd like to thank everyone who has contributed articles. This issue would be a whole lot smaller if not for you. And thanks to everyone who's gotten excited by this thing. Particular thanks to Cheryl Morgan for answering a whole bunch of questions about epub. If you haven't already checked out her new magazine Salon Futura, You're missing a treat.
It's not going be only me in here though. I'm counting on you. Yes, you. You at the back. I know you've never sent anything to a fanzine before. I don't care. I know you're passionate about stuff. The fact that you managed to find this, download it and are reading it now proves that. If you've got something you're passionate about and you want to tell the world, here's a place where you can let people know. Check out the submissions page for more details. Send us something great. Please.
That's enough from me. Enjoy.
****
Table of Contents
About the Cover Artist
My introduction to genre through dice and rulebooks - John Klima
Remembrances of things future - Fábio Fernandes
The art house project - Matthew Sanborn Smith
A body is for driving - Matthew Sanborn Smith
Science, faith and fire lizards - Jeremiah Tolbert
"I think everything counts a little more than we think": Reflections on The National's Boxer - Mark S. Deniz
Review: Endhiran - Grant Stone
Goddam future music - Kit O’Connell
The end
****
Cover: Construct by Ashley Storrie
Ashley got her first acting part at the age of three as 'the wee girl in the metal tea urn' in the movie Alabama.
Ashley recently graduated with honours from her Film & Screenplay Studies degree course and has since been directing and writing for BBC Radio and TV.
She performed with her mother Janey Godley at the 2010 Edinburgh Fringe in the daily children's show Tall Storrie & Wee Godley.
Be sure to check out Ashley and Janey's podcast, Janey Godley's Podcasts
****
My Introduction to Genre through Dice and Rulebooks
John Klima
I blame it all on my brother. He’s six years older than me, and like any good little brother, I wanted to be just like him. I even went so far as to tell people that when I grew up I wanted to be my brother1. There wasn’t a thing he did that I didn’t want to do, too.
Towards the end of 1977, purveyors of holiday animated films2 Jules Bass and Arthur Rankin, Jr. unleashed the animated version of The Hobbit on American audiences. That Christmas my brother got a boxed set of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. It wasn’t long before I was reading them, too.
I was forbidden to read his books. You see, I was a grubby little kid. I got the pages sticky. I bent pages. I tore pages. I was a general menace to books.3 But I couldn’t help myself. I wanted to read those stories.
I think at the direction of my mother, he put up with it.
The next year my brother joined the Science Fiction Book Club. Books by Zelazny, Vance, Farmer, Varley, and Donaldson filtered into our house. These were hardcovers. These were books I was not to touch.
And of course I did.
At some level I think my brother liked sharing this with me. He had someone at home to talk about the books. I wasn’t allowed to start a book until he was done with it as I read faster than he did. That rule I could live with.
At school I investigated what else genre had to offer me. It was grade school, so I was reading people like Andre Norton, John Christopher, and Douglas Hill. I also found Beowulf and read it so much that to this day I know the story by heart.4
Then 1979 rolled around and there was something new on the horizon that was about to change everything. My birthday is in March and my brother’s in July. He convinced me, in a way that only older brothers can, that I needed to ask for Dungeons & Dragons for my birthday.
This was the blue boxed set of basic D&D. It came with a rule book, dice (awful, awful dice), module B1 “Search of the Unknown”, and some other miscellany. Somewhere we also acquired a set of Dungeon Geomorphs and a Monster and Treasure Assortment.
If my love of genre hadn’t been imprinted into my genome by Tolkien, Donaldson, and Zelazny et al, D&D took care of that.
We picked up a few other basic modules and played those a few times each. But when my brother’s birthday struck during the Summer, we started gathering up the Advanced D&D rulebooks. Between birthday and lawn-mowing money we got the Dungeon Master’s Guide5, the Players Handbook, and the Monster Manual. What we could do with the game was only limited by our imagination.
We were ready to become gods.
For whatever reason, I was always the Dungeon Master and my brother ran a party of adventurers. We played a lot of modules, but I created adventures, too. Being a properly mollified younger bother, my brother’s part of adventurers was absurdly successful. If there really had been such a group of low-level adventurers with as much magic as they carried, they would have been rolled by some evil wizard or a horde of Mongols or something. Hell, maybe even the local Baron would round them up in order to retain his power.
But our thoughts never ventured into those realms of game play. Remember, I was eight or nine years old with a terrifying teenaged older brother,6 I wasn’t about to risk his ire by injecting reality into our roleplaying.
It was clear that Tolkien and even C. S. Lewis had an influence on this game. But there was clearly more than just those two authors. I no longer have the books, but I can remember that in the introductions7 to the rulebooks the editors mentioned their influences in creating the games.
But it was 1980’s Deities & Demigods that sealed my fate forever.
In addition to giving stats to all the Greek, Norse, Chinese, Indian, and many other pantheons of gods, the first printing als
o included Michael Moorcock’s Melnibonéan gods and creatures, Fritz Leiber’s Nehwon gods and creatures, and H. P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu elder gods. To my nine-year-old brain, the fact that AD&D decided to pick their worlds over any other writers’ worlds meant they were the best. It meant that I needed to read them next.
Leiber and Lovecraft were easy to get from the library. Moorcock was a different issue. The librarian wasn’t comfortable checking out the material to me, and when I asked for the books for Christmas, my brother informed my mother they were full of sex8 and that was the end of that.
Or was it?
I was able to convince my mom that I needed my own membership to the Science Fiction Book Club, since I wasn’t supposed to be touching my brother’s book anyway, and two of my selections were the two SFBC omnibus editions of Elric of Melnibone, The Sailor on the Seas of Fate, The Weird of the White Wolf, The Vanishing Tower, The Bane of the Black Sword, and Stormbringer. Now I had access to these stories that had gained mystical importance due to their unattainability.
Thankfully Moorcock didn’t disappoint. If I wasn’t already headed down the genre path never to return, Moorcock and Zelazny made sure I wanted to stay.
If someone had told my nine-year-old self that some day I would meet Zelazny and edit Moorcock, I think they would have fried my synapses right there. Heck, I think if you had told me that one day I would interview to be an editor at TSR9 I would have exploded in disbelief.
I am happy to be in genre. I’m happy to make it my home. You have the freedom to do whatever you want in genre, and I, for one, like being in place that constantly renews itself.
1 I also wanted to be a Tyrannosaurus Rex, a mailbox, and a fireman.
2 They did everything from Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, to Here Comes Santa Claus, to Frosty the Snowman, to Peter Rabbit is Coming to Town.
3 I used to collect comic books, and I can remember more than one whose pages were stuck together with syrup so badly that the cover tore and bits and pieces remained stuck to the first page of the comic.
4 My wife recently read the Seamus Heaney translation for a class and we could discuss the book at length even though I’ve not read Heaney’s version. Heaney’s is only one of many translations I have of the work.
5 I remember being embarrassed by the cover of the Dungeon Masters Guide which featured an efreet holding a barely clad (and very buxom) adventurer. This picture held all the promise of these books. Perhaps some day we would move along in our adventures to be able to encounter and battle an efreet.
6 My brother is a perfectly nice person these days. And while I portray him as a tormentor, there was a lot of torment that I deserved as a grubby little brother.
7 And exactly how desperate are you as a kid to read the introductions to some rulebooks? That’s dedication.
8 He did tell my mom that I didn’t know about what was in the books and that they were referenced by the game we were playing. I’m sure he had to do some song and dance to keep from getting the game taken away from us, so he was protecting himself, too.
9 Strangely enough, TSR’s offices were in Lake Geneva, WI, my home state. I ended up living in Lake Geneva after I got married, but never got hired there. I moved out East and worked in publishing in New York City instead.
****
John Klima previously worked at Asimov's, Analog, and Tor Books before returning to school to earn his Master's in Library and Information Science. He now works full tme as a librarian. When he is not conquering the world of indexing, John edits and publishers the Hugo Award-winning genre zine Electric Velocipede. As of 2010, the magazine has also been nominated for the World Fantasy Award four years in a row. In 2007 Klima edited an anthology of science fiction and fantasy stories based on spelling-bee winning words called Logorrhea: Good Words Make Good Stories. Klima is currently editing an anthology of fairy tale retellings called Happily Ever After which will be published in 2011. He and his family live in the Mid West.
****
Remembrances of Things Future – a Journal
Fábio Fernandes
Things come to me in bursts.
Memories come and go, some faded, some vivid. Past memories are more clear to me these days than a few years ago – blame it on aging. I’m 44, and this is the 21st Century, so I’m not a decrepit old geezer, but if there is one thing we definitely (even us, time travelers of the science-fictional trade) can’t do, is to turn the clock back. That we cannot do.
So, the further we advance in time – in the direction of a future we can’t possibly know yet but we are certain that it is not the robots-and-spaceships future we dreamt of in our childhoods – the closer we get to our own personal pasts. Our memories start reaching us, more often, and more vividly. Starting as of this issue, I would like to share some of these memories with you. Memories past and future. Of a real past (a past as I remember, not as it might have really happened, as Dickens and Ballard have elegantly pointed out to us before) and of a future (or futures) I wish that could have happened in my dreams. And in my nightmares.
Memory 1: Neuromancer
The year is 1989. Before the fall of the Soviet Union and the Berlin Wall. I used to have nightmares with nuclear war during the eighties and often woke up terrified, sweating profusely. Who the hell told you Americans and Europeans that we Brazilians weren’t worried about it as well? Earth was (still is, by the way) our world too.
I started reading science fiction very young, but there weren’t many translations available in the Brazilian market in the sixties and the seventies. No, let me correct that: there weren’t many good translations then. We did have a lot of authors translated – the all-time favorites and bestsellers, like Asimov, Bradbury, and Clarke (we also published Heinlein here, but in Brazil the Big Three included Bradbury, not Heinlein) and pretty much that for Anglo-American ones. Most of the authors published then were French, from the books of the famous Fleuve Noir collection, that featured both interesting authors like Stefan Wul and crappy ones – but fun for teenagers – like Jimmy Guieu. I stopped reading them before high school.
Things started to get interesting to me in 1984, when I, having finished my English course, finally felt I could read something more meaty than comic books, which I had already been experimenting for a while. I started with Agatha Christie, then moved to Ken Follett, then I took a deep breath and started Frank Herbert’s Dune. That was the point of no-return.
(Right after that, I found a whole lot of Frederik Pohl’s books in an used bookstore, bought them all, read most of them and became the biggest Brazilian fan of this year’s winner of the Hugo Best Fan Writer Award, and I even could tell him this personally when he came to Rio de Janeiro in 1988 – but that’s another story.)
Still 1989. Since 1987, me and a group of friends used to buy books from that old, famed bookstore in California, The Other Change of Hobbit. Bear in mind that this was before Amazon.com – hell, this was before Tim Berners-Lee created the World Wide Web! We had to send a mail order, and, two or three months later (even more, if memory serves), it arrived, in mint condition. But I don’t blame the bookstore for all that lag; after all, we used to order a whole crate of books – a dozen or so guys buying a hundred books, so there you have it.
I bought so many good books through that buddy system. Gateway, for instance ( I had the older Pohls, but not that one). And Neuromancer. That book really blew my mind.
Until then, I was an avid reader of all kinds of science fiction, and I considered myself above the Brazilian average fan, because I could read in English, so in 1989 I had already read authors like Fred Pohl, William Tenn, Chad Oliver, Fredric Brown. Fifties and early sixties, mind you. I hadn’t even read Dangerous Visions, even though a friend had already told me of its existence. But Neuromancer came first.
It was all I ever wanted. I will spare you of the details, since William Gibson’s magnum opus now belongs to the collective imaginary of humankind and need no further introduction or analysis.
Just let me say this: it changed my world. It made me definitely want to be a writer – and not only a science fiction one. It opened my mind to a whole universe out there. It also, alas, caused, after a few years, a very painful breakup with the Brazilian fandom.
I had found out, through Gibson (and, right after that, Sterling, Rucker, Cadigan, Kadrey, Kelly, and the whole lot of cyberpunks), that SF was all about revolution, and the fandom in Brazil didn’t want any of it. Both readers and writers alike wished to be left alone to read their old, stale SF classics and write stories with the same old, stale tropes – but I couldn’t do that any longer. I had gotten out of the cave.
I’m not giving myself any measure of self-importance here, mind you. I’m not the biggest SF writer in Brazil by far, neither I’m telling you I was the only person in his right mind in the middle of a lunatic asylum, the only one to see the truth. What happened then was this: I discovered a whole new lifestyle inside SF, a lifestyle already five years old (more, probably) in the Anglo-American world and all I wanted was to convey that to my writer friends. It didn’t work: the fandom remained the same inane thing in Brazil, at least until a few years ago (but that’s also another story).
All Neuromancer ever did to me was show me the way to be a better writer. It was no bible, but it was the next best thing to a 23-year-old guy in 1989. And I like to think that worked out for the best.
****
Fábio Fernandes is a writer and a translator. He has translated more than 100 stories between novels, graphic novels, and comic books, among which A Clockwork Orange, Neuromancer, Snow Crash, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Vol.1, and many others. As a writer, he published an essay on the work of William Gibson (A Construção do Imaginário Cyber – in Portuguese only) and the novel Os Dias da Peste, the first volume of the Convergence Trilogy. He published a number of stories in English in online venues (including Hugo-Award-winner Starship Sofa) and in paper anthologies like Steampunk Reloaded and the upcoming The Apex Book of World SF, vol. 2.