You can’t get your science fiction merit badge without knowing that Isaac Asimov’s robots were made by the fictional U.S. Robots and Mechanical Men, Inc., founded in 1982, the same year Susan Calvin was born. (Yes, that means she’s a millennial. She joined the firm in 2008, if it comes up in a trivia contest.)
When people see the name of the firm they immediately start to wonder what the difference is between a robot and a mechanical man. Some people. Me, mostly. I’ve never found anybody else asking the question. But I can’t tell you how much it bugs me. If a company has both names it must make both things. Yet nowhere in I, Robot or The Rest of the Robots does Asimov so much as mention a mechanical man or differentiate his robots in any way. Robots by the score but no mechanical men or for that matter mechanical women.
Others did. He probably didn’t know it at the time, but Asimov was scooped. A real world firm had been started in 1938. Its name was Mechanical Man, Inc.
The Ditmar Awards are named for Australian fan Martin James Ditmar Jenssen. Founded in 1969 as an award to be given by the Australian National Convention, during a discussion about the name for the award, Jenssen offered to pay for the award if it were named the Ditmar. His name was accepted and he wound up paying for the award for more years than he had planned. Ditmar would eventually win the Ditmar Award for best fan artist twice, once in 2002 and again in 2010.
The first Ditmar for Best Fan Writer was awarded in 1979, when it was won by Marc Ortlieb. The award has been presented each year since then with a record four-year winning streak set by Bruce Gillespie (1989-92). Gillespie tied with Ian Gunn in the second year of that winning streak and has won the award a record nine times between 1989 and 2005. Leanne Frahm won the award for the first time in 1980 and would win the award a second time in 1998.
Leanne Frahm was born in Brisbane, Australia on February 28, 1946.
Frahm attended James Cook University and worked in a bank. She became involved in acting in and directing community plays and eventually attended a writers’ workshop in Sydney, which led to her publishing in fanzanes and a professional career.
She was nominated for the Ditmar Award for Best Fan Writer in 1979 and the following year she won the award. She would win a second Ditmar Award for Best Fan Writer in 1998.
The Locus Awards were established in 1972 and presented by Locus Magazine based on a poll of its readers. In more recent years, the poll has been opened up to on-line readers, although subscribers’ votes have been given extra weight. At various times the award has been presented at Westercon and, more recently, at a weekend sponsored by Locus at the Science Fiction Museum (now MoPop) in Seattle. The Best Book Publisher Award dates back to 1972, although in 1975 and 1976 the Publisher Award was split into paperback and hardcover categories. Ballantine Books won the award each year from its inception through 1977 (winning the paperback for the two experimental years with the Science Fiction Book Club winning the hardcover award). In 1978, when Del Rey was established as an imprint of Ballantine, Ballantine/Del Rey began winning the award. The award was not presented in 1979 for works published in 1978, but when it was reinstituted in 1980, Ballantine/Del Rey picked up its winning streak. In 1980. The Locus Poll received 854 responses.
Anthony Boucher and J. Francis McComas pitched the idea of a fantasy magazine to Lawrence Spivak at Mercury Press in the mid-1940s and a companion to Spivak’s publication Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. The Magazine of Fantasy was founded in Fall, 1949 with editors Boucher and McComas. With the second issue, the title was changed to The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Boucher and McComas set the magazine apart from other science fiction magazines not only with their choice of material, which tended to being more literary in nature, but also in the magazine’s design. McComas left the magazine following the August 1954 issue for health reasons, but Boucher continued to edit the magazine until the August 1958 issue. Following Boucher’s departure, Robert P. Mills edited the magazine until March 1962 and then Avram Davidson took over until November 1964. Joseph Ferman, who had bought the magazine in 1954 edited it for a year before turning the editorial tasks over to his son, Edward K. Ferman, who edited the magazine until June 1991, after which Kristine Kathryn Rusch became the magazine’s editor until May 1997. Gordon van Gelder took over editorial duties and purchased the magazine from Ferman in 2001, turning over the editorship to Charles Coleman Finlay in 2015.
The Ditmar Awards are named for Australian fan Martin James Ditmar Jenssen. Founded in 1969 as an award to be given by the Australian National Convention, during a discussion about the name for the award, Jenssen offered to pay for the award if it were named the Ditmar. His name was accepted and he wound up paying for the award for more years than he had planned. Ditmar would eventually win the Ditmar Award for best fan artist twice, once in 2002 and again in 2010. The Ditmar Award for Best Australian Long Fiction (alternatively, Best Australian Novel) has been presented each year the Ditmar Awards have existed. The 1979 award was won by Robert Ingpen for his artbook, Australian Gnomes at Swancon 5, held in Perth.
In 1979, in his Ditmar Award winning book Australian Gnomes, Australian author/artist Robert Ingpen created a version of Australia in which gnomes lived, mostly unseen, amongst humans, much as Brian Froud would do with the subsequent Lady Cottington’s Pressed Fairy Book (1984). Since Australia is a land of immigrants, Ingpen’s gnomes also came from different places around the world, each group retaining ties to its specific culture of origin and based on the human society from whence they came. His gnomes come from Ireland, Northern and Southern Europe, Mongolia, and Argentina. Just as with the humans who have settled Australia, they have built a combination culture even while retaining their ties to their homelands.
Most of our participation in the Great Conversation these days is taking place, not in the halls of academia or in fireside clubrooms, but on social media virtual spaces like Facebook. One conversation that many people have been engaging in lately is prompted by the question “Can you separate the art from the artist?”
Another fact of our present moment is that the most sordid and intimate details of public figures are dragged into the light, subjected to intense scrutiny and immediate judgment. Some of our most beloved actors, our most cherished writers, our most celebrated musicians are suddenly being exposed as pariahs, shameful corrupted beings who must be exiled from the spotlight – and, possibly, from our bookshelves and our stereos and our movie streams.
It is not just entertainers currently in the spotlight who are subjected to this new scrutiny. We hear about how certain renowned science fiction writers of the past might have behaved like some of the characters on the TV show Mad Men. Do we jettison the touchstones they left us in disgusted protest? Reaching further back, can we still curl up for some chills with H.P. Lovecraft when we know he was a racist? Can we unabashedly thrill to the adventures of John Carter and Tarzan when we know Edgar Rice Burroughs reinforced some colonialist “great White savior” views?
Many of you know that my family is Spanish, and even though I was born in Canada I identify culturally as Spanish.
What you may not know is that recently my husband and I have been planning to move to Spain. Paul has wanted to move since our first visit there together, but to be honest, I wasn’t that keen – mainly because of the complexity of the Spanish infrastructure. Spain pretty much invented bureaucracy in the 1500’s figuring out how to deal with all that gold from the new world. I well remember the time I had to stand in 3 lines to buy stamps.
British kids thrilled to real-world rockets and space travel as did American kids. Sputnik conquered space in 1957. By 1963 both the Russians and the U.S. boasted about astronauts circling the Earth. Canada launched the Alouette 1, Valentina Tereshkova became the first woman to enter space, signals had been bounced off communications satellites, probes flew by the Moon and Venus. The Dyna-Soar project promised a reusable space craft that looked like the coolest rocket plane ever.
Publishers around the world jumped on the trend. A UK firm called Atlas Publishing & Distributing Ltd. wanted a piece. It released Book of Space Adventures, called on the inside the “Boys’ Book of Space : With factual features on the World’s space programme AND fictional adventures of SPACE ACE – intrepid Commander of the Galactic patrol”.
The Balrog Award, often referred to as the coveted Balrog Award, was created by Jonathan Bacon and first conceived in issue 10/11 of his Fantasy Crossroads fanzine in 1977 and actually announced in the final issue, where he also proposed the Smitty Awards for fantasy poetry. The awards were presented for the first time at Fool-Con II at the Johnson County Community College in Overland Park, Kansas on April 1, 1979. The awards were never taken particularly seriously, even by those who won the award. The final awards were presented in 1985. Both categories in which Allen was nominated, Amateur Achievement and Amateur Publication, lasted the entire run of the Balrog Awards. Allen had won the Achievement award the first year the awards were presented.
The World Fantasy Awards are presented during the World Fantasy Convention and are selected by a mix of nominations from members of the convention and a panel of judges. The awards were established in 1975 and presented at the 1st World Fantasy Convention in Providence, Rhode Island. Traditionally, the awards took the form of a bust of H.P. Lovecraft sculpted by Gahan Wilson, however in recent years the trophy became controversial in light of Lovecraft’s more problematic beliefs. The Non-Professional Special Award has been part of the award since its founding. In 1980, the year Allen received the award for his work on Fantasy Newsletter, the convention was held in Baltimore, Maryland.
Gaming on the high seas! Or at least medium seas. My wife and I went on the 2019 Dice Tower Cruise, a sold-out floating board-gaming convention of 600 adults plus 200 children. Five days aboard the Independence of the Seas, with stops in Jamaica and Haiti and access to the Dice Tower library of games.
Some of those 600 adults and most of the children didn’t participate in the gaming action, and some only dabbled. It’s a cruise, with usual huge array of activities available. This makes it an excellent vacation getaway for gamers whose families are less than enthused about the hobby.
Independence of the Seas holds about 4,400 passengers, so the DTC was a sizeable group, warranting its own dining room. We had the conference center for round-the-clock gaming, and additional table space was available in various restaurants at certain times of day. We also had the big theater for recording a live episode of the Dice Tower podcast, and a smaller venue for a few other Dice Tower gatherings/shows.
A while back at Can*Con 2017, I had the pleasure of meeting author and journalist Waubgeshig Rice for a panel discussion on post-apocalyptic fiction and First Nations perspectives in Canada. The panel came together partly because Waub was beginning to promote his then-forthcoming novel Moon of the Crusted Snow, which released in 2018 from ECW Press (and I reviewed a little while ago here). Despite being incredibly busy with different projects, Waub was game for a one-on-one interview to discuss Moon and some of his other work, which I’ve included in full below. Before that, here’s a little more information about Waub, courtesy of his website:
Waubgeshig Rice is an author and journalist originally from Wasauksing First Nation. His first short story collection, Midnight Sweatlodge, was inspired by his experiences growing up in an Anishinaabe community, and won an Independent Publishers Book Award in 2012. His debut novel, Legacy, followed in 2014. A French translation was published in 2017.
He got his first taste of journalism in 1996 as an exchange student in Germany, writing articles about being an Anishinaabe teen in a foreign country for newspapers back in Canada. He graduated from Ryerson University’s journalism program in 2002. He currently works as a multi-platform journalist for CBC News in Sudbury, where he lives with his wife and son. In 2014, he received the Anishinabek Nation’s Debwewin Citation for excellence in First Nation Storytelling.
