OtherRealms A Reviewzine for the Non-Fan Where FIJAGH Becomes a Way of Life Issue #10 November, 1986 Part 1 Why Judge a Book by its Cover? The Art of Paperbacks Jim Vadeboncoer, Jr. ABORIGINAL SF MAGAZINE #1 Fred Bals What I Did on My Summer Vacation - or - WorldCon 1986 Jeff Copeland IT Dan'l Danehy-Oakes Dimensions of Science Fiction R. E. Webber Part 2 Pico Reviews Books Received OtherRealms Notes Words of Wizdom Reviews by Chuq Von Rospach Part 3 The Ozzie and Harriet Fiction by Fred Bals Why Judge a Book by its Cover? The Art of Paperbacks Jim Vadeboncoer, Jr. Copyright 1986 by Jim Vadeboncoer, Jr. I collect the work of artists who display their art on the covers of paperback books. It's not a very glamorous gallery. Few bookstores display all of their paperbacks cover out; fewer still organize their books by cover artist. Many fine paintings end up facing their own back cover or get lost in a sea of color; looking, from a distance, no different than the next one. It is into this haphazard display that a new artist sends his work, and from which the collector must seek it out. Why should anyone spend time (or money) finding books with 'pretty' covers? That's easy. I like pretty pictures (or good art, to be more sophisticated) and paperback covers are one source of supply. I also like illustrated books, illustrated paperbacks, comic books, calendars, portfolios, magazines -- anything that has pretty pictures. I like them and I collect them. Paperbacks are just another medium as far as the artists are concerned, so why should I make distinctions where they do not? [Ok, time out here! I do read! I read a lot. Mostly I read books. I prefer good writing to good stories, will settle for either in a pinch, but generally keep searching for the combination of both. It's often a long, empty task. It's a lot easier to find good art.] As in any hobby or collecting effort, there is a great deal of personal taste involved in deciding what to collect. I won't apologize for mine if you don't apologize for yours. I like what I collect and generally collect what I like. If our tastes differ, I hope we can still discuss the concept without the specifics getting in the way. Should I neglect to mention one of your favorites, please refer back to this paragraph. Many fine fantasy artists today are graduates of the paperback cover school. Frank Frazetta, Jeff Jones and George Barr come to mind as having done numerous covers in the past but who now seem to have left the field to the horde of new talent that proliferates the SF and Fantasy racks of the book stores. Jim Gurney is such a newcomer (30 covers in three years), and one to watch. He's recently done covers for the latest reprints of the Jane Gaskell ATLAN series (following in the footsteps of both Frazetta and Jones), as well as such dramatic covers as ZANZIBAR CAT (Russ) and PHAID THE GAMBLER (Farren). You can also find his work in the National Geographic Magazine where he illustrates articles such as the recent re-creation of the voyage of Jason and the Argonauts. Some of the other new talent I've been following include Richard Berry (GODMAKERS -- Herbert), Richard Bober (MUSTAPHA AND HIS WISE DOG, SPELLS OF MORTAL WEAVIN -- Freisner), Thomas Canty (COPPER CROWN, Kennealy), Paul Chadwick (FORWARD - Dickson), Alan Gutierrez (SATURNALIA -- Callin), Phil Hale (BORDERLAND -- Windling), Alan Lee (BROKEDOWN PALACE -- Brust), John Pound (The WITCHWORLD Series -- Norton) and Gary Ruddell (THIEVES' WORLD reissues -- Asprin). None of them was painting covers in the Seventies, and several have only appeared this year. It's an exciting time for cover watchers. Actually, it's always been fun for the cover collector. At some point the first Kelly Freas cover hit the stands (circa 1955). At that time you could also find cover art by Everett Raymond Kinstler and Norman Saunders, Rudolf Belarski and Earle Bergey, not to mention the numerous cover artists for the pulps that were also competing with the paperbacks of the day. Virgil Finlay, Ed Emsh and Valigursky, Freas (here, too) and numerous others were available to the cover collector of the Fifties. In the Sixties it was another apparent Golden Age. Frazetta did his best work in this decade. Jeff Jones, Roy G. Krenkel, Virgil Finlay, Robert Foster, Leo and Diane Dillon, Kelly Freas (still), James Bama, Gray Morrow, Ed Emsh (again), and dozens of others were plying their trade for the collectors of that decade. The early Seventies saw the beginning of the European invasion that had begun in Jim Warren's CREEPY and EERIE comic magazines. Two of Warren's top cover artists, both from Spain, found their way to Dell books and began careers that are still going strong today. San Julian and Enric (or Enrich) were the first in a wave that was to contain Jordi Penalva, Segrelles, and Maroto. San Julian did several of the trade paperback CONAN covers (Ace -- Howard) while Enric is probably best known for his DORSAI covers (Ace -- Dickson). Also in the 1970 to 1975 period Jim Steranko and George Barr proliferated. Frazetta and Jones were still going strong, as were James Bama (DOC SAVAGE) and Kelly Freas (Laser Books). The last decade has introduced most of the artists I've listed (and dozens of others sacrificed to space). The quality of paperback cover art is at a stage where even the lesser talents are doing good work. There isn't much in the way of junk on the stands, although several very slick stylists are covering up a lack of talent and imagination with superficial rendering techniques. Still, the overall professionalism of the genre has seldom been higher, nor has the variety of styles being employed. There are as many genres or stylistic 'schools' of cover art as there are of art in general. o There's realism -- most SF artists fall into this category -- where people look like people. Whelan, Maitz, Corben, San Julian, Alexander, Gutenberg, Freas, De Fate, Hildebrandt: all fall within this category to some extent. o A sub-category is hyper-realism where Boris and Rowena hold sway. I do enjoy Boris, but more for his backgrounds and creatures than for his self-portraits and flesh tones. It's there that he does his best work. In the same school, Rowena leaves me cold. o The romantic school often encompasses many aspects of the realists. In fact, certain artists move easily between the genres, like Don Maitz. The distinguishing aspect of the Romantic artist is the stylization of the scene; the intent to capture mood more than precise form and shape. Leo and Diane Dillon are the definitive romantics, while the most stylized are Robert Gould and Thomas Canty, both of whom draw heavily on the English Romanticists of the last century; most obviously Sir Edward Burne Jones and Dante Gabriel Rosetti. Kinuko Y. Craft is another multi-styled Romantic who tends towards the Oriental for her inspiration. o The surrealists of the cover artists are few. One would think that SF covers would be the ideal outlet for covers ala Dali -- with transdimensional space and time warping the images into unfamiliar shapes. Somehow we don't seem to respond well to such scenes, although a few artists have managed to make it palatable to us. I classify John Berkey here. Some may argue that he belongs to the realist school. I disagree. Another artist, who hasn't done much work lately, but whom I have always thought an under-rated surrealist, is Robert Foster. He did the covers for Pangborn's DAVY (Ballantine's 1964 edition) and Moorcock's BEHOLD THE MAN (Avon, 1970). o The heroic fantasy school have all studied under Frazetta and, while I find it difficult to classify Frazetta himself, he does provide a category for his followers. Ken Kelly heads the list and actually did take lessons from the master. The early works of Jeff Jones, Boris, and San Julian were all of this school, but all have graduated to more personal styles. o The catchall category of stylist is my cop-out. I don't really know where to place such artists as Richard Courtney (Varley's TITAN series) Gino D' Achille (the GOR series), Howard Chaykin (Saberhagen's SWORDS trilogy), Steve Hickman (Stasheff's WARLOCK series), and dozens of others I enjoy because of their distinctive and personal styles. Generally, I tend towards realism and romanticism in the art I like and collect. I classify Michael Whelan as tops in both as he manages to blend the two into a coherent whole. Whelan's easy to collect as he's done so much (over 120 covers) and many of the books for which he's done covers are still in print. he's now, it appears, the official Asimov cover artist for Del Rey, having just completed the covers for a reissue of the FOUNDATION series. He's also the cover artist for the H. Beam Piper reprints from Ace and the YEAR'S BEST HORROR series from DAW. As his fame increased, he began to do hard cover dustjackets which have eventually made their way to the paperback versions: Anne McCaffrey's WHITE DRAGON in 1978 was the first of over 30 hardbacks for which he's done dustjackets and occasional interior illustrations. The other aspect of Whelan's art that really intrigues me is that he obviously reads the stories before doing the painting, and seems (to me, anyway) to do his best work on the best stories. I find that I can generally decide whether or not I'm going to like a book with a Whelan cover simply by looking at his cover 'synopsis.' For instance: I found Heinlein's THE CAT WHO WALKS THROUGH WALLS to be a good yarn at first, but one that dissipated into meaningless drivel towards the end. If you own a copy of the book, look at Whelan's cover portrayal of the characters and tell me if you can find the torso of Richard Ames. He, like the story, fades away into nothingness. The painting itself is quite fetching, but ends up quite unsatisfying. It's incomplete -- just like the story. Whelan doesn't lie with his covers. They are very accurate reflections of the books they cover. Donald Maitz is another favorite, though he leans more towards the romantic than the real. Maitz has been associated with several writers including Anthony, Carter, Cowper, Fisher, Flint, Lee, Lustbader, Taylor, and Gene Wolfe. Though his people and settings seem real enough at first glance, the romance of his work continues to thrill me even after several viewings. Take, for instance, the cover to THE WORTHING CHRONICLE by Orson Scott Card (Ace, July 1983). The main design involves a golden figure encased in an underwater device obviously meant to keep him alive. We know it's underwater because bubbles are rising toward an unseen surface. They rise past the horizontal figure and pass in front of a circle of intelligent origin that also points back towards the source of the bubbles: a space helmet trailing a torn air hose. Once we're convince of the watery nature of these surroundings, we notice that there is a fantastic looking fish chasing a smaller fish towards the left edge of the cover. Then we notice that the smaller fish is chasing a small school of yet tinier fish. This prompts us back to the right of the drawing to see the curved snout of yet an even bigger fish that is about to catch the first one. And there we are drawn by the curves of this fish to inevitable notice the bracket that supports the cast of the human is actually the artist's signature. You can see that there is fantasy, design and humor to work, even to working his signature into the design of each painting. But the real laugh came the second time I looked at this cover and realized that all of the fish, predators and prey, are swimming into the maw of a gigantic fish at the very left edge of the cover. We only see the smallest portion of both upper and lower jaws, and they aren't immediately recognizable as such, but it's a subtle punchline with which few artists would have bothered. Someday I'll find another copy and read the story - simply because of the intrigue of Maitz's cover. All of the artists I've mentioned display individual talents that intrigue me, some obviously more than others. Their styles appeal to my love of the unusual and the beautiful. Some of the images these artists have created will remain with me forever -- having struck a chord deep within my subconscious. What more could one ask for in a hobby? Well, the greatest bonus I've gotten is that I've bought and read dozens of books I would never have, simply because I dared to judge them by their covers. ABORIGINAL SF MAGAZINE #1 Editor, Charles C. Ryan $2.50/issue bimonthly Reviewed by Fred Bals Copyright 1986 by Fred Bals E-mail: bals%nutmeg.DEC@decwrl.DEC.COM ABORIGINAL SF is a new, bimonthly sf prozine published out of Woburn, Massachusetts in a newspaper-sized format. Issue #1 (October, 1986), 24 pages in length, contains articles, book and media reviews, and four pieces of fiction. The magazine has a mix of color and black-and-white illustrations, plus photography. My first inclination after finishing ABORIGINAL SF (ASF) was to be tougher on the magazine than it deserves. ASF is professionally done -- the copy, printing, lay-out and color reproductions show a commitment to produce a carefully thought-out, well-done magazine. Yet, ASF's editorial staff shoot themselves in their collective foot by the second page. In a near-terminal act of cuteness, the editor, Charles C. Ryan, proclaims that ASF is published by an alien who is studying Earth and has developed a fondness for SF. Hence the magazine's name, as the alien considers us all to be aborigines. Ryan goes on to earnestly claim that the alien has tapped into various writers' word processors and is sending the material to his/her/its home planet. Ryan, naturally, has tapped the alien's transmissions in turn and is publishing the results. Linked with the editorial is a "Report From Our Alien Publisher," which is as stupid as you'd expect it to be. And of course, boys and girls, there's also a NAME THAT ALIEN contest that gives us the opportunity to win a lifetime (ours or the magazines) subscription to ASF! My hope is that Ryan will come to his senses within the next few issues of ASF and discard the whole alien publisher idea. Otherwise, the contest winner may very well outlive their subscription. Although this silliness effectively sabotages ASF's intent to be taken as a serious prozine, the magazine is still worth your time to locate and read. The book review column by Darrell Schweitzer is excellent, and Schweitzer's opening remarks on the role of the reviewer have interesting parallels to Chuq Von Rospach's article in OtherRealms #9. Schweitzer, in my opinion, has always been one of the best of the independent reviewers, offering good, strong criticism on SF works. ASF will also be useful to many readers (especially those without speciality book stores in their area) with its offering of a mail order service that will provide copies of books reviewed or advertised in each issue of the magazine. Equally as good as Schweitzer's piece is Jessie Horsting's media review column, "The Reel Stuff." Horsting offers facts, rumors, and gossip from the Hollywood scene as it pertains to SF. She writes well, and her column makes interesting reading. An overlong article by Hal Clement called "The Home System," unfortunately deals with the home system of the ubiquitous alien publisher of ASF. Excusing that, it's a well-written hard-science piece for those interested in seeing how Clement creates the backdrops for his stories. And those readers who like information about authors and artists should be pleased with Laurel Lucas' "Aborigines" column, which details the doings of many of the contributors, as well as other notable SF figures. With the exception of Orson Scott Card's "Prior Restraint," the fiction in ASF #1 is pedestrian. Card's story is an interesting tale that is both about, and for, writers. Couched in the plot lies an actual paradox that all writers must sooner or later confront in their careers. Lou Fisher contributes a rote story about a man and his robot, "Fixing Larx," and John Moore puts a SF twist on a standard revenge plot in "Sight Unseen." John A. Taylor's "The Phoenix Riddle" pulls a MEDEA: HARLAN'S WORLD by having its setting placed in the "alien publisher's" home system. I found the story unreadable -- in all fairness, mostly because I was already prejudiced against anything else that even dealt slightly with the alien publisher. Editor Ryan promises more stories set in the "Home System." I can only wonder whether he already has planned an anthology. ABORIGINAL SF promises stories by Frederick Pohl, Harlan Ellison, Connie Willis, and Charles L. Grant in later issues. If you're able to ignore Ryan's alien publisher conceit and are looking for a well-crafted magazine that appears to be trying to bridge the fan and prozine markets, I recommend ABORIGINAL SF to your attention. The editor notes ASF will only be available in bookstores specializing in science fiction or through subscription from: ABORIGINAL SF Dept. 101 PO Box 2449 Woburn, MA 01888-9989 Six issues for $12, 12 issues for $22, 18 issues for $30. You can obtain a sample copy of #1 by writing to the same address and enclosing a check for $2.50 plus .50 cents postage. What I Did on My Summer Vacation - or - WorldCon 1986 Jeff Copeland Copyright 1986 by Jeff Copeland E-mail: decvax!mcnc!jeff My real summer vacation was spent in Atlanta, Georgia, starting at 5am on Sunday August 31st, and ended a little more than three days later. But the trip there took nearly a year and was an entertainment all its own... My wife, Liz Schwarzin, and I counted this year's Hugo ballots and administered the voting for the 1988 and 1989 WorldCon sites. It was an interesting challenge, caused me to read about three-quarters of a million words of science fiction, made us persona non grata in some circles, was more work than I want to undertake again real soon, and overall was the most fun I've had with my clothes on since I first read THE HITCHHIKERS' GUIDE TO THE GALAXY. The point here is to talk mostly about what happens behind the scenes at a World Science Fiction Convention, and a little about what I did there. The work on a WorldCon starts in earnest about a year before the actual convention. By then, the basic plans have been laid, the guests of honor chosen, the hotel contracts signed. But once last year's convention is over, all eyes are turned toward the one coming up. So Labor Day last year is when we started thinking about the details of the 1986 Hugos. This year, the convention organization was divided into five divisions: administration (finance, volunteers, registration and Hugo balloting), operations (communications, purchasing), publications (press relations, program book, progress reports), events (the Hugo cermony and masquerade), and programming. So what happens before the convention? The program gets planned. Panelists are contacted ("Dear Dr Sagan, We would be delighted if you could be on a panel at WorldCon on large numbers..."). Big events are blocked out in time and space (for a 6000 person convention, the masquerade has to be in a room that holds at least 4000; the panel on sex-and-fandom will probably be large and should be in a room that will hold 500 people). Progress reports -- the news of how the convention planning is proceeding -- are prepared and mailed to the membership, and always, people write in to get memberships. The film program is planned ("Mutant Tomatoes from Mars is a Hugo nominee, so I suppose we'd better show it; how 'bout Wednesday morning at 2:30am?") In July, it all goes into high gear: Memberships by mail close because lists have to be prepared for use at convention registration. The program is finalized, more-or-less --- there will be a myriad of changes at the convention because people didn't show up, for example. Hugo balloting ends, so they can be counted and the plaques engraved with the winners' names before the convention. The program book goes to press, with biographies of the guests, lists of past WorldCons, the governing documents for the World Science Fiction Society, and so on. Labor Day weekend, though, it all hits the fan, if you'll pardon the pun. People arrive from all over the world, and all that planning goes into play. The program works (or doesn't), there are major events and presentations, an art show, exhibits, and a lot of parties. With luck, the convention ends Monday afternoon, and everyone goes home having enjoyed themselves. How did this translate to one real department? The nominating ballot for the Hugos went out in February. By the time nominating was over on April Fools' Day, 570 of them had been returned. Then the nominees were verified before they could appear on the final ballot --- were the fiction nominees all in the right categories?, had the fanzines published an issue in the last year?, and so on --- there is nearly a page of these details in the rules that govern the Hugos. [An aside here, to show you what sort of decisions have to be made: It was the decision of the Hugo subcommittee this year that SF-Lovers isn't a fanzine, despite the nominations it received. Even though some of the Hugo subcommittee reads it, we couldn't justify to ourselves that it either had a central editor or was generally available, both of those in our view being necessary to be on the ballot.] Once we had a list of valid nominees, we called most of them up to make sure they accepted. Then the final ballot was typeset, then it was printed and sent out with the site selection ballots. The Hugo ballots started arriving almost immediately, at the rate of 15 or so a day, until the last week before the July 15th deadline. That week, we got 260. We tried to enter the ballots into the computer as they arrived. Time to get the ballots into the computer? About 100 hours altogther. Total elapsed time for our IBM PC to count them? Seven minutes. Then off to the engraver to get the plaques made. Once we were in Atlanta, it got even more hectic. While Liz handled all the work of managing the site selections (a full-time job by itself), I took care of the details with the events people, attached plaques to Hugo trophies, and got press releases written. (If you've never seen a Hugo trophy before, they are a chrome statue of a rocket, on a base that varies from year to year. Ben Jason and Jack McKnight machined the first Hugos in the early 50's based on -- if I've got the story right -- a Buick hood ornament. This years' bases were white Georgia marble, and look damned good, if I do say so myself. I'm sure there will be pictures in the October issues of Locus and Science Fiction Chronicle, if you're interested.) After the Hugo ceremony Saturday night, we skipped the parties, and sat down with 12 folks from the five bidders for the '88 and '89 conventions and started counting the ballots to see whose turn would be next after Brighton in 1987. That took until about 4:30 Sunday morning. Which is how my REAL vacation started at 5am. (It would have been much later, or in a straight-jacket though, if it hadn't been for a lot of good help. Charlie Martin (crm@duke) and Chris Kostanick (mongor!chris), for example, deserve heaps of praise for trailing around after Liz and me and helping keep track of details.) So why go to all this obvious effort? I once made the observation that the folks who run conventions are a lot like the folks who do amateur theatrical productions: they put in a lot of work for no money, under a lot of stress, mostly for the ego gratification of having done it and the thrill of watching it happen from the other side of the stage. The crucial difference is that on a convention, almost nobody does the same thing two years in a row, and almost never knows what to do until they're into it -- which is why it's even more of a miracle that WorldCons work at all. This year didn't prove me wrong. I had a lot of fun watching the convention from the wings, even though I got to see a lot of the wings and little of the convention. The moral of this long story, for those of you who attend conventions, is that there's a lot going on behind the scenes and in rehearsal (to keep the theater analogy) that you don't see. And some people do this almost full time avocational job, in addition to their regular "mundane" job, as their rather odd idea of what constitutes "fun". Do I find this paradoxical? No, I don't. But then, this is written by a man who drafted the program to tally the Hugo ballots with an antique fountain pen. IT Stephen King [****] Reviewed by Dan'l Danehy-Oakes Copyright 1986 by Dan'l Danehy-Oakes E-Mail: djo@ptsfd.UUCP This is gonna sound strange, friends and neighbors, but I swear, it all happened JUST THIS WAY: I took a ride to the local drive-in bookstore last Friday, and asked for the novelization of TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE II. "Not yet," they told me, "but you might like this one," and handed me a big ol' book -- and people, I mean but BIG!!! How big was it? It was so big I damn near got a hernia just writing the check to pay for it, that's how big it was. So I took this literary anatosaur back to my humble abode, and sat down to sample the first few pages. See, this little kid goes out to play with his toy boat. Only it goes down a sewer drain, and when he looks down to see where it went there's this clown down there, and the clown rips the kids arm off. Then it started getting weird... Next thing I knew, it was Sunday, my fingers were bleeding from turning pages, my eyes were bloodshot from insufficient sleep, and I was STILL 500 pages from the end. Heads, arms, and other assorted body parts roll (and some of 'em keep on rolling long after any self-respecting dead, dismembered body part would've stopped). There's knife-fu, belly-fu, tentacle-fu, claw-fu, and too many other fu's to name 'em all. Even THINK-fu! Dan'l says, check it out. * * * Sorry about that; King always affects me that way, a little. But now that it's out of my system, let's take a look at IT. To begin with, IT is easily the most complex novel King has given us to date, written in the third person with six principal viewpoint characters, numerous characters (including ITself) with brief passages told from their viewpoints, long interludes told by one character in the first person, and a passage in a journalistically neutral style. Furthermore, it follows two separate actions, involving the same characters but separated by 27 years, in a parallel structure so tight that the transitions between the adult scenes and the childhood scenes frequently take place in mid-sentence without feeling forced. Laid out this way, it sounds a complete stylistic hodge-podge; and that it does NOT come out a shambles when you read it is a good indication of just how strong a writer King has become. As a plain ol' story, this one's hard to beat. For four nights running, it kept me turning pages, almost obsessively, until I fell asleep from sheer exhaustion; I would get up in the morning, go to work, and hurry home to find out WHAT HAPPENS NEXT. King is at his very best when dealing with child protagonists. This frequently leads to "clever" remarks about "arrested development," but it is interesting to notice that the adult forms of the characters in IT are his best-conceived (adult) characters to date, an honor formerly held by John Smith of THE DEAD ZONE -- whom we also see as a child, if only for one scene. Perhaps King needs to think through his characters' childhoods in detail in order to make them "real" as adults? There are weaknesses. I will mention only the biggest: the ending. After the final defeat of the monster and the escape from ITs lair, the characters are left with one major problem. To go into detail would be a major spoiler, but suffice it to say that the solution seems too easy, and too much of a deus-ex-machina for my tastes: this is what cost the book its fifth star. Recommended, highly, but with reservations -- primarily that you should have a lot of free time, and NOT have a weak stomach. Dimensions of Science Fiction William Sims Bainbridge Harvard University Press, 1986, Hardback, 278 pages Reviewed by R. E. Webber Copyright 1986 by R. E. Webber ihnp4!topaz!webber The author investigates the science fiction subculture via a survey completed by 595 participants at the Iguanacon World Science Fiction Convention held in Phoenix, Arizona in 1978. One might well wonder why it took 8 years for this information of congeal into a book. The answer probably lies with the fact that although the author claims to be closer to the truth because he crunched some numbers, the bulk of the text is a rather classical history of science fiction done in the scholarly mode (including 20 pages of bibliographic notes). The survey consisted of a number of general questions about science fiction and a section on rating authors. The participants ranked 140 science fiction and fantasy authors (including all Hugo and Nebula winners) on a range from 0 to 6. The survey instructions requested that unfamiliar authors be left unranked. 409 respondents managed to rate more than fifty authors without ranking the two fake names included in the survey. Of these, 276 managed to rate 75 or more authors. In descending order, the highest ranking authors (in the sense of having highest average ratings when ranked): Isacc Asimov, Larry Niven, Robert A. Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke, Poul Anderson, Fritz Leiber, Anne McCaffrey, Ursula K. LeGuin, J. R. R. Tolkein, Roger Zelazny, Theodore Sturgeon, Gordon R. Dickson, Zenna Henderson, Raccoona Sheldon, Frederik Pohl, Clifford D. Simak, Robert Silverberg, and Alfred Bester. Each of these had an average ranking over 4.5. Isaac Asimov had the highest average ranking with 5.08. Raccoona Sheldon scored 4.56 under that name and 4.52 under the name James Tiptree, Jr. Factor analysis on the rankings of the 276 who ranked more than 75 authors generated 4 orthogonal factors. Factor 1 was most strongly associated with Isaac Asimov, Murray Leinster, Gordon R. Dickson, Jack Williamson, Harry Harrison, and A. E. van Vogt. Factor 2 was most strongly associated with Harlan Ellison, Robert Silverberg, Damon Knight, Joanna Russ, Philp K. Dick, and Kate Wilhelm. Factor 3 was most strongly associated with J. R. R. Tolkien, Anne McCaffrey, C. L. Moore, Fritz Leiber, and Andre Norton. Factor 4 was most strongly associated with H. G. Wells, Jules Verne, Edgar Allan Poe, H. P. Lovecraft, George Orwell, and Arthur Conan Doyle. The problem with the notion that this study is scientific starts with the naming of these factors as, respectively: hard science fiction, new wave, fantasy, and classics. The next hundred pages of the text revolve around the claim that these names are a reasonable interpretation of whatever lies behind the factors. This is done by presenting the same kind of material as a traditional presentation of science fiction would (with occasional cross references to the survey). The less the author is trying to be "scientific", the more he becomes "interesting". The author presents science fiction in terms of the history of those aspects of science fiction that group among the first three factors. The discussion of each group is a mixture of determining what authors are favoured by that group and what other opinions are held specifically by members of that group. Additional authors of the "Hard Science tradition" are: Clement, Reynolds, Pournelle, del Rey, Smith, Laumer, Anderson, Niven, Clarke, Simak, Campbell, Bova, Hoyle, Wollheim, Heinlein, Carter, Pohl, Robinson, Haldeman, Blish, and de Camp. For our respondents, Space Opera is as strongly tied to Sword-and-Sorcery as it is to hard science. Of course this observation is just part of a running discussion of how much science is there in science fiction. Additional authors of "the New Wave" are: Sturgeon, Malzberg, Aldiss, Lafferty, Burdys, Tiptree, Vonnegut, Spinrad, Delany, Huxley, Merril, Orwell, Brunner, LeGuin, Pohl, Davidson, Bloch, Bester, Bradbury, and Haldeman. The New Wave is presented as emphasizing "literary and aesthetic values, seeking to create the art of the future rather than the science of the future". Additional authors of "the Fantasy cluster" are: Merritt, Haggard, Howard, Moorcock, Lewis, Bradley, de Camp, Burroughs, Lovecraft, and Zelazny. While the Hard Science tradition and the New Wave are presented has having activistic overtones, the Fantasy cluster seems to support the status quo. The remaining 75 pages of the main text turn to the more general questions of the survey. The author finds that both science fiction and fantasy readers have a substantially higher regard for the space program than the general public. However, while science fiction has always encouraged thoughts about space flight, the author claims, as stated in his earlier book (The Spaceflight Revolution, 1976) that it is doubtful that science fiction has had much pro-space impact on the general public. Mostly science fiction is viewed as a place where free-thinkers congregate and are exposed to a variety of ideas. The educational value of science fiction appears to be in broadening the reader's horizons rather than in the presentation of science. Indeed, it is noted that science fiction seldom presents people involved in scientific research (as opposed to presenting "scientists" performing various social functions). There is also a discussion of the growing role of women in fandom (and the possible relevance of Star Trek to this phenomenon). Above, I have presented the main themes of this book. Let me stress that the survey plays a larger role in the above summary than it does in the actual text. The text is filled with interesting quotes and citations, for example, Sturgeon's Law was first presented in a book review for Venture Science Fiction (March 1958) and Heinlein's Space Cadet became a popular 50's television show: Tom Corbett, Space Cadet. Thus the text yields to light skimming as well as concentrated study. OtherRealms is Copyright 1986 by Chuq Von Rospach All rights reserved One time rights have been acquired from the contributors. All rights are hereby assigned to the contributors. Reproduction rights: OtherRealms may be reproduced only for non-commercial uses. Re-use, reproduction or reprinting of an individual article in any way on any media, is forbidden without permission.