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Editorial Notes by Mike Glyer
The Hills Are Alive With The Sound of Fanac: This fanzine is coming to you from the shores of Bass Lake in Northern California, where the mountains are beautiful, the air is clear, the weather is bright, and I haven't looked at a tax return in two months!
Diana is one of the professors Azusa Pacific University selected to start its new "Semester at Yosemite." It's a program based on the Great Works concept. Students are enrolled in some combination of courses in World Literature, World Civilization, Art History, Church History and Philosophy. All of the courses make use of many of the same literary and philosophical works. About 40 students are spending the term at a summer camp not far from Yosemite National Park. Diana helped develop APU's program, and we had the opportunity to go together because I was able to take leave from work.
So the day after I flew home from the Worldcon, I packed my car and drove into the mountains east of Fresno. For two weeks we lived at the camp, until our rental home became available - a remarkable five-bedroom "cabin" overlooking Bass Lake. Once the summer crowd took their jet-skis home, it's remarkable how many birds came out again.
There are ducks of all kinds, kingfishers, herons and egrets. There are Canadian geese, and also six domestic geese gone wild. We've seen a bald eagle. There are coots everywhere, waterfowl slightly smaller than ducks. In the morning, two hundred coots take over the shallow end of the lake, tails up while they stir the muddy bottom to find their breakfast. They gradually work their way along the shore. Paddling energetically, they leave a surprisingly large wake and collectively look like a fleet of landing craft approaching the beach.
The domestic geese swim in shallow water and pick at the bottom like the rest, until someone walks onto the landing behind our home. The geese are accustomed to people throwing food to them. If I appear they fix a beady eye on me. If I give the slightest encouragement, they'll flap and honk and run straight at me. Legend holds that a flock of Roman geese woke up the gods to save the Capitoline hill from attack, but now I'm convinced the geese were simply running to the Gauls screaming "Feed me!"
I spend a significant amount of time in seminars or reading classic works of literature and philosophy that I'd never gotten around to -- Augustine, Anselm, Aquinas, Dante -- or had tackled on my own in high school without enough training to comprehend -- Plato. Participating in classes gives me the incentive to read these works because there will be people to discuss them with. Sometimes I'm in the midst of the action - reading the part of Tiresias in our productions of Oedipius Rex and Antigone.
It's an intense learning experience. The students, especially, have left some distractions behind, like TV. But they all have a laptop with a wireless Internet connection, which can be used to deepen their studies, or play Counterstrike 'til 4 a.m. Or both. The sky's the limit on what a person can accomplish who never sleeps!
Axes To Grind: Did Millennium Philcon mark a changing of the guard among Hugo voters, or have a different demographic than other Worldcons? Harry Potter never got a sniff of the Hugo before, but Rowling's latest novel did more than win this year, it got twice as many first place votes as the nearest competition. Some writers were outraged that a non-sf book won, referring to the result as "Harry Potter and the Hugo of Shame." Although the Hugo rules allow the award to be given to works of sf or fantasy, one can understand how this could be forgotten, since fantasy as practiced by Tolkien, Lovecraft, Moorcock, etc. has never won before. Other writers, and fans too, were upset that someone who doesn't know the sf community won its top award. Ordinarily, voters ignore bestselling writers outside the field, for example, Michael Crichton. However, I think Greg Bear explained the result very well: the vote is a tribute to a writer who has done more than anyone to attract young readers to our kind of literature.
The winner of the Best Dramatic Presentation Hugo was another anomaly, except that Crouching Tiger won with little grumbling from anyone besides me. It's true that although fantasy novels are rarely competitive for Hugo awards, quite the reverse is true for fantasy films: The Princess Bride, Who Framed Roger Rabbit and two Indiana Jones movies have won Hugos. The only obstacle Crouching Tiger had to overcome was fans' long-standing habit of rejecting box-office champions. Since the end of the original Star Wars trilogy, top-grossing sf films have rarely won the Hugo. The list of losers includes E.T., Armageddon, Phantom Menace (not even nominated), The Matrix, and every single Star Trek movie.
My objection is that Crouching Tiger is it's wildly uneven, a patchwork of genius and incompetence. I enjoyed Crouching Tiger's desert sequences and its tavern brawl. On the other hand, the movie had more than its share of running across rooftops on guy-wires. And the sword-fighting in treetops sounded good in the reviews but on screen was no more believable than Bugs Bunny.
Of course, you voters nominated Bugs Bunny for a Retro Hugo, too.
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