Harry Warner Jr.

I'm very sorry that I've been so lax about responding to the issues of File 770 you've been sending faithfully without complaints attached. For most of this year, I've been suffering from poor health, old age has caught up with me and left me unable to do anything as rapidly and as well as I once could do it, my eyes are weaker and prevent me from reading for long spells without watering so badly vision is blurred, and I've been in abysmal spirits. My locs have been almost completely confined to the small fanzine that can be read in a few minutes and responded to on a single page of typing. In mid-summer I almost pulled the trigger on gafiation and desisted only because of the guilt it would cause me about my debts to fanzine fandom. Even a small fanzine represents an investment of nearly a dollar for its producer and the large ones that arrive may cost three or four bucks to produce and mail. If I can make some return on these investments in me by responding somehow to the stacks of unlocced fanzines, I may feel comfortable following the example of the vast majority of gafiated fans. I've found three fairly recent issues of File 770 in the stack and I'll try to say a few things about them as a taken of my good intentions and bad behavior.

     [[A Harry Warner loc is still the best-written part of most fanzines, this one included!]]

     The most recent, your 140^th issue, must be the one you remember best. I found the editorial sort of neighborly if I'm right in assuming that the Great Works concept that occupied you this summer is an outgrowth of the Great Books seminars that were devised at a small Maryland college about a half-century ago by a former resident of Hagerstown. For a time, even small towns had their own Great Books organizations, meeting regularly to discuss the volumes included in Dr. Funk's invention.

     Wouldn't Bob Madle's catalogs of science fiction and fantasy publications for sale provide most of the information Ron Salomon is seeking? Bob's prices are sane, compared with what you might find asked at a big convention. He usually has some fanzines in addition to paperback and hardback professional books and prozines.

     It seems hard to believe that September 11 didn't wreak havoc on at least a few fans. If it had come ten days earlier, the outcome for fandom might have been much different.

     I can understand John Foyster's concern over his electronic fanzine falling into hands he'd rather not touch it. I used to be quite frank about my life and Hagerstown events in my FAPAzine. I stopped doing so after one member offered for sale a large collection of it and then I learned that the fan who was doing the mimeographing for me was running off extra copies and selling them for his own benefit at conventions. I'm much more discreet nowadays.

     Your obituary of Milton Rothman was excellent. All I might have added to it was the fact that he was one of the pioneers in fandom of the introspective, frank writing about oneself in the early years of FAPA. He was also a very good pianist when young and at one time, I believe, he said he had thoughts about making a career as a concert pianist.

     I might have done the inconceivable and attended briefly the Philadelphia worldcon if I'd known the past of the convention center beforehand. I think that, as an old railroader, I would b more interested in that giant structure than in what was happening in it. I can't remember for sure if I was ever in it while it was used for its original purpose. My first visit to Philadelphia came around 1945 when there was still passenger train service between here and there and I covered the launching of a Navy ship named Antietam for the nearby battle for the local newspapers. But I can't recall if I went by bus or train.

     I think the Retro Hugo fiction awards were justified in three of the four categories. But I've never shared the general admiration for "The Little Black Bag." It depends on not one but two preposterous coincidences that even Dickens might have gagged at, the fact that a physician found the doctor's bag and the way its power was shut off at just the critical moment.

     The Retro fan awards seem less satisfactory to me. Maybe it would be better to find in some old fanzine the winners of a popularity poll conducted in this or that year and award them Hugos on the theory that their contemporaries were better judges of their abilities than today's Hugo voters.

     [[True, the voters in the old polls were undoubtedly more fit to judge the best work of their day. Current major league baseball players are probably more insightful about who belongs on the annual All-Star team. The exchange of precision for popularity in opening the All-Star voting to the public or the Retro Hugo voting to current fans is made in hopes of interesting many more people in the subject matter than might be otherwise.]]

     I also thought something hit close to home in the 139^th issue, the squib about the high-priced license dealers at the worldcon were forced to pay the state or rather Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. I believe this is the very same extortion from temporary dealers that ruined a big outdoor flea market that I used to love. Twice each summer, a town ten miles away over the Mason-Dixon line in Pennsylvania had this event, which ran for five or six blocks along the main street and attracted mobs of vendors and customers from Maryland. Then the event was ordered to collect license fees from out-of-state dealers. Almost all of those from Maryland rebelled and stopped attending, the shrinkage in the offerings caused crowds to dwindle rapidly, and I no longer wallow in its delights because there aren't enough offerings to justify the round trip.

     I certainly wouldn't qualify for that job with the SCI FI Channel for many reasons, but I hope whoever is chosen for the post tries to persuade the management to vary its endless succession of old movies and television series with an occasional personality piece about famous creators of science fiction, perhaps a few readings from their own works by the most famous authors, and other features. A&E has found its biographies to be the providers of its highest ratings in recent years. Both AMC and TCM have done brief features about famous movies and celebrated actors without apparent damage to their ratings. Why shouldn't this sort of thing also succeed on a channel that is supposed to be involved with science fiction?

     Francis Hamit's article on copyright and related matters was the most interesting item in this issue to me. However, I'm not quite sure if it reassured me about a matter that has been a worry. The copyright page of the hardcover edition of A Wealth of Fable failed to credit me as copyright holder. I still have a vague hope that someday I might get this book as I wrote it into print or onto a CD or some other placed and I've been worry that this lack of credit in the most recent edition might disqualify me from doing with my manuscript as I wish.

     I believe John Hertz is the only person in fandom who can't be accused of too much wordiness from time to time. His prose reads as if he had spent hours over every paragraph so each word contributes something necessary to his narrative. Once I found myself in the middle of a police-fugitive car chase. Fortunately, it wasn't a high-speed event because it occurred in the middle of Hagerstown where traffic was too heavy for cheap thrills. Pursued and pursuer kept circling around the downtown blocks and it took me awhile to turn off into a side street before they did so. The general public seems unable to understand why the fast and long chases occur in the open country. One lady wrote to the newspapers and asked why the police car doesn't just drive at a safe speed and keep going until the quarry runs out of gas.

     I noticed [in #138] that the HarrySF club's time capsule predictions didn't include the cellular telephone phenomenon. For that matter, did any published science fiction story or amateur magazine ever put into print a prediction that by 2001 practically everyone would be addicted to the things? I've read some complaints about people who even chat on them while standing in supermarket checkout lines. The local public school system has been sharply criticized for threatening to ban cellular phones from classrooms. The AM radio stations constantly issue public service warnings about the dangers of using the things while driving, then invite people on the road to call in to their talk shows.

     I felt uncomfortable while reading most of the Donald Anthony Reed tributes and obituaries. It seems unfair to wait until a person is dead and can't respond before publishing in great detail the deceased's apparent failures and quirks. It's a small scale of the Mommy Dearest allegations in book form.

     I believe Rick Sneary had a change of heart sometime before his death and announced he wasn't interested any more in the South Gate Again in 2010.

     Nobody in fandom ever approached Bill Danner's achievement for invisibility. As far as I know, only one fan saw him in person during his decades-long fanzine publishing and letter writing. Bill even had an unpublished zip code for awhile. There was a goof in assignment of zip codes and his part of rural Pennsylvania was skipped over temporarily.

Greg Benford

This was a very good issue, crowned by your conreport. You have a good eye for detail. I laughed out loud when you described people not signing up to be on the Worldbuilding 101 panel after noting that I and Hal Clement and Yoji Kondo were on it -- surely we're not that formidable?! In fact that continuing line of items, four I think, led to a well designed world suitable for immediate occupancy by sf writers. Paul McAuley and I, on the last come-to-Jesus panel, discussed writing stories on the world ourselves; it was that tempting.

     Overall I thought the con programming was first class, with far more than I could get to. Alas, Milt Rothman's absence meant I never met him, in all the years we'd been going to the same cons; and now he's gone.

     Congratulations on the Hugo. It was a wide-ranging ballot this year. Challenger is surely in line; latest #15 just received is very good. Some are mentioning the Rotsler Masques Bill Warren has been sending out as potential nominees. That would be striking -- posthumous recognition! I'd support it.

CHip Hitchcock

So -- how many people have written to point out the connection between "Millennium Philcon" (a name Davey suggested long before the Philly bid got started) and The Kessel Run? It's not that obscure a pun.…

     And you may have missed the best part of the editorial brawl; after various people displayed buttons saying "Bring me the head of Mike Nelson," he showed up at teardown wearing a tasteful duct-tape choker.

     Geese can be very demanding; some followed us most of the way around Oslo castle after ConFiction. But those weren't a patch on what we found at Loring Park, one of the Minneapolis locations featured in War for the Oaks; when we got back to the convention we complained to Emma Bull that her book didn't warn about the not-so-wildlife, to which answered that all the squirrels in Loring Park wear black leather jackets. (It was the only way they could compete with the geese.)

     I suppose I shouldn't be baffled by people who insist that the Hugos must be for science fiction; this has never been true, and was formally denied twenty years ago (after fiascoes with Lin Carter and the Gandalfs), but even the most notable old work isn't much read today. The earliest collection of Hugo winners includes Bloch's "That Hell-bound Train" (1959), which is certainly fantasy; one can argue that there haven't been that many winners because until recently more of published SF has been science fiction rather than fantasy. (For a long while fantasy didn't sell to science fiction readers; Unknown couldn't get enough interest to outrun the World War II paper shortage, and The Magazine of Fantasy had to have "and Science Fiction" added shortly after it was founded.)

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