The Adelaide Fan Review

Our last discussion for the year (December is usually an expedition to a restaurant for food)! As usual, 7pm at kappys, 22Compton Street.

The Who

No-one has offered a topic, so I’m going to suggest members visit the ABC and have a look at the first two episodes of the new Dr Who spinoff, Class.
Episode 1: For Tonight We Might Die:
http://iview.abc.net.au/programs/class/ZW0907A001S00

Episode 2: The Coach With The Dragon Tattoo :
http://iview.abc.net.au/programs/class/ZW0907A002S00

Coal Hill School has become Coal Hill Academy, and we follow the misadventures of some students and their teacher (appropriately named, as she is rude and spikey), Miss Quill.

The What

As we have noted elsewhere, attendance at Critical Mass has been down this year (though the author sessions provoked some interest). We basically want to find out what we can do to attract more people: do we need to change the venue? time? format? content?; and what can we do to attract more people?

Feel free to answer the quiz we have sent out, or post a comment to this post.

 

 

While we’ve got a slowly growing mailing list (now up to 16 members), this hasn’t resulted in an increase in numbers attending the Critical Mass evenings.

We’ve been meeting regularly for over two decades, but it’s  not at all clear that there’s enough interest to continue regular meetings. The irony is, there’s more SF on TV, film and published in Australia than ever before. Why aren’t we getting the numbers for Critical Mass?

Is it the venue? We moved from the SA Writers Centre because the shrinking membership didn’t justify the annual fees. Our current venue is near the market, cosy and opens specially for us. People seem to like the steampunk coffee roaster, and the balcony venue. Is it too hard to find? Does the monthly gallery opening just down the road divert possible attendees?

Is it the time? We’ve settled on the first Wednesday of the month, but would it be better earlier in the week? Or would you prefer weekends?

Is it the speakers? We haven’t had many volunteers to deliver talks in the last two years; the largest audiences came for the three talks by authors. Would members prefer us to programme a series of speakers a yer in advance? Is the idea of preparing a 40 minute critical talk too daunting for newcomers? Should we run a few workshops on critical talks? Or should we go for 2 or 3 short (10 min) presentations followed by general discussion?

Should we cater for more diverse talks on comics, film, radio and TV as well as written SF? (We’ve had a diverse range in the last year, but this hasn’t lead to bigger audiences.)

is it too old-fashioned to insist on in-person attendance? Should we allow people to connect to talks on G+ or skype? Or at the least, allow our guest speaker to connect remotely via the net?

Perhaps we should just publish the talks a fortnight beforehand, and then meet to discuss them?

Is the problem that we have too low a profile, and might we be better off joining a larger group en masse and forming  a specialist subgroup?

 

 

A Night in the Lonesome October
is a delightful fantasy novel by Roger Zelazny published in 1993, near the end of his life. It was his last book, and I must shamefully admit that I hadn’t read it until recently. The story is narrated as a series of diary entries for the month of October by the dog, Snuff (bottom right on the cover), who is the animal companion of (we presume) Jack the Ripper.  It is set in an October where there is a full moon on Halloween, a time when the Elder Gods try to cross a portal into our universe.
A game is played out between the Openers and the Closers, who gather in the month of October near the location of the portal (the exact position of which must be calculated  during the month).
The cast of characters includes The Great Detective, the Count, the Good Doctor and his Mechanical Man, Larry Talbot, a Witch, a mad Pastor, a Russian Hermit, perhaps some Grave Robbers. As our hero interacts with the animal companions/familiars of the players, we learn more about the players and which side they’re on. A delightful Victorian gothic fantasy romp, gorgeously illustrated by Gahan Wilson, this is some of the best Zelazny has done. Worth buying just for the graveyard scene, where various players trade body parts — others, not their own.

Note that this year in Australia, Halloween will be the night of a Black Moon — the second new moon in a month!

Dimension X: Adventures in Time & Space is a compendium of a dozen episodes of the radio programmes, featuring dramatisations of classic SF stories from the 50s. It’s a nice clean recording, complete with newsbreaks such as the declaration of war between North and South Korea.

Worth a listen to realise how SF has grown, and how time-bound many SF stories have become. Includes some classics which have become clichés.

Contains: The Outer Limit, by Graham Doar; Jack Williamson’s With Folded Hands;  Report on the Barnhouse Effect by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr;  George Leffert’s No Contact; Frederick Brown’s Knock; Robert Bloch’s Almost Human; Murray Leinster’s The Lost Race; Donald A Wollheim’s The Embassy; Robert Heinlein’s The Green Hills of Earth;  an adaptation/preview of the George Pal film of Heinlein’s Destination Moon; Ray Bradbury’s There Will Come Soft Rains / Zero Hour;  Murray Leinster’s A Logic named Joe; Ray Bradbury’s Mars is Heaven; George Lefferts’ The Man in the Moon;  and Villiers Gerson’s Beyond Infinity.  In short, the first sixteen episodes of the show, originally broadcast from April to July, 1950. Listening to the series I can’t help noticing the underlying paranoia in many of the stories, possibly a result of the cold war. Despite that, it’s a good collection of stories.

A personal list for October 1st of SF films worth watching!

• Stalker (Andrei Tarkovsky)
• Metropolis (1927, as restored)
• 2001: A Space Odyssey
• The Man in the White Suit
• Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956)
• Fifth element (1997)
• War of the Worlds (Geo Pal, 1953)
• A Clockwork Orange (1971)
• Blade Runner (1982)
• District 9
• Charly (1968) (Flowers for Algernon)
• Alien (1979)
• The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951)
• Forbidden Planet (1956)
• Dark City  (1998)
• A Scanner Darkly (2006)
• Minority Report (2002)
• Attack the Block (2011)
• Inception (2010)
• Dark Star (1975)
• Alphaville (1965)
• The Andromeda Strain (1971)
• The Time Machine (1960)

Rolling Stone recently published a list of their all-time best TV shows.

Just for fun, see if you can name these shows which are on the list.

Answers: Torchwood, AstroBoy, Firefly, Quatermass Experiment, Utopia, Star Trek Next Gen, Dollhouse, Black Mirror, Outer Limits (Demon with a Glass Hand),  Star Trek (The Trouble with Tribbles), Quatermass and the Pit, Orphan Black, X-Files, Fringe, Buffy, Dr Who, Babylon 5, Battlestar Galactica (remake), The Prisoner

Take a trip down the Einstein Highway where the course of mighty rivers can be changed, journey into space travelling the universe with Speed King, King of Space, Rocky Starr, and Captain Miracle, passing beyond the stars on to the conquest of time itself, and, on the day of the triffids, be menaced by Man, Mark 2.

These were the worlds of science fiction broadcast on radio in nineteen-fifties Australia. You too can be exposed to the radioactivity of the air waves. Only scattered fragments in the fading memories of one who was there and heard too much. This is your chance to catch a few rays.

Quick audio quiz:

• Which hardboiled detective has been dealing with angels in Chicago?
  The Angel’s Kiss by Melodie Malone is the book the Doctor was reading when he and Amy and Rory were sitting in Central Park at the beginning of The Angels Take Manhattan. The book has been properly completed, and was released as a BBC audiobook, read by Alex Kingston. So the answer is Melodie Malone/Alex Kingston
• Which series is set in a world where disputes are settled by duels, often fought by professional swords for hire?
  Ellen Kushner’s Swordspoint trilogy
  
• What radio serial is connected by the London tube stations? (Hint: not Mornington Crescent.)
  It is, of course, Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere. It started out as a 6-part TV series, followed by a novelisation, audio book, complete extended edition novel. It’s also appeared as a comic written by Mike Carey. In 2010 it became a hit stage play for Chicago’s Lifeline Theatre. March 2013 saw an all-star radio adaptation by BBC 4

  

• Who are the Android Sisters and how are they connected to PK Dick?
  Two frankies (androids) who appear in the first Ruby radio series, singing songs including Do Androids dream of Electric Sheep?, the title of the PK Dick novel made into the film Bladerunner.
• Name two australian podcasts which have been nominated for Hugo and/or world fantasy awards. Galactic Suburbia, The Coode St Podcast, The Writer and the Critic were all nominated for fancast Hugos in 2014; Galactic Suburbia won in 2015.

Roman’s giving a quick overview of the state of audio SF: audiobooks, radio plays and podcasts. With a few carefully chosen examples, he hopes to persuade you that there are unseen riches in there valleys. After all, special effects are a lot cheaper!

Come along and find out what’s happened since HitchHiker’s!

Quick audio quiz:

• Which hardboiled detective has been dealing with angels in Chicago?
• Which series is set in a world where disputes are settled by duels, often fought by professional swords for hire?
• What radio serial is connected by the London tube stations? (Hint: not Mornington Crescent.)
• Who are the Android Sisters and how are they connected to PK Dick?
• Name two australian podcasts which have been nominated for Hugo and/or world fantasy awards.