Electronic OtherRealms #25 Summer/Fall, 1989 Part 1 of 17 Copyright 1989 by Chuq Von Rospach All Rights Reserved OtherRealms may not be reproduced without permission from Chuq Von Rospach. Permission is given to electronically distribute this issue only if all copyrights, author credits and return addresses remain intact. No article may be reprinted or re-used without permission of the author. Table of Contents Part 1 Editor's Notebook Chuq Von Rospach Part 2 From Beyond the Edge Reviews by our readers, Part 1 Part 3 From Beyond the Edge Reviews by our readers, Part 1 (continued) Part 4 From Beyond the Edge Reviews by our readers, Part 1 (continued) Part 5 Scattered Gold Charles de Lint Doris Lessing's Canopus in Argos Fantasy in the Mainstream Chuck Koelbel Part 6 Odds 'n' Ends Alan Wexelblat Past Imagining: Forgotten Classics Lawrence Watt-Evans Part 7 Much Rejoicing Dan'l Danehy-Oakes Part 8 Thoughts on Reading the Classics M. Elayn Harvey Scattered Gold Charles de Lint Part 9 From Beyond the Edge Reviews by our readers, Part 2 Part 10 From Beyond the Edge Reviews by our readers, Part 2 (continued) Part 11 Words of Wizdom Reviews by Chuq Von Rospach Part 12 Books and Magazines Received Part 13 The Agony Column A Special Look at Horror in the Small Press Rick Kleffel Part 14 No Prisoners Reviews by Laurie Sefton Part 15 The Agony Column Rick Kleffel Part 16 Your Turn -- Letters Thomas Maddox Martin Morse Wooster R. Allen Jervis George Walker Sheryl Birkhead Richard Brandt Gary Farber Part 17 Your Turn -- Letters (continued) Ken Meltsner David Thayer Editor's Notebook Chuq Von Rospach Welcome to issue #25 Here we are, 25 issues later, still trying to get it right. I never expected OtherRealms to survive 25 issues and four years (the first issue was January, 1986, so I'm about to begin year number five). OtherRealms, on the other hand, is not even remotely the fanzine I envisioned it to be. Writers talk about a plot or a character taking on a life of its own. So is OtherRealms, thanks to the enthusiasm and support of the many writers, artists and readers. I may be editor, but it's very much a collaborative event, and much of the credit belongs to the people who take time to get involved and pitch in. The first 25 issues were a joy to publish. I hope the next 25 are as much fun for you as they are for me. What I did on my summer vacation For those who were wondering, no, there was no Summer issue. This issue is a combined Summer/Fall edition which should be about double the size of a typical issue. My apologies for the silence, but too many things happened all at once, and I ended up with the choice of doing a small, sloppy issue on time or combining Summer and Fall into a double-sized issue and taking a little more time. Hopefully, now that I'm back on schedule, I'll stay that way (hint: don't move, have a computer and a hard disk die within days of each other and then have the disk drive manufacturer sit on the repair for nine weeks. It does wonders to schedules). The typo fairie again The typo fairie was at the last couple of issues. Thanks to both Laurie and Dan'l and their endless scrutiny of pages of work-in-progress, the number of typos in OtherRealms has dropped significantly. Unfortunately, those that are left are sneaking into places where only I can find them. Calling Sheryl Birkhead Sheila, for instance, or letting the spell checker rename Peggy Ranson to Ransom. Or, for that matter, the typo in the return address two issues back (rule 1 of publishing: proofread everything. Rule 2: proofread it again!). Getting names wrong is inexcusable and sloppy, and my apologies to the people I accidently dinged. Promotions I'm really thrilled to announce the following change in my masthead. We have, as of this issue, made Laurie a co-editor of OtherRealms, acknowledging the fact that, for a long time now, OtherRealms is more than a single person can handle. A lot of the improvements that have happened in OtherRealms in the last year can be traced back to her by taking on onerous tasks like editing and proofreading and helping me think through future directions and design decisions. The reality is that OtherRealms has grown to the point where, even if I wanted to, I couldn't do it alone. Laurie's been a lot of help acting behind the curtain and it's time to make her contributions public. Without her, there would be no OtherRealms. Laurie's going to be taking on some of the functions I've been doing as well, giving us both a chance to work on new and different things. From now on, please refer Fantasy and Science material to her. I'll continue to work with Science Fiction and Horror material as well as the art, although I hope eventually to let her deal with the artists as well (she's got a much better background in art than I do; unfortunately, right now, the art is tied too heavily to the layout aspects, which I'm still doing). The hope, obviously, is to share the workload so that OtherRealms can stick to a regular, reliable schedule without either of us burning out. It's also a way for me to publicly say "thank you" to her for always being there when I needed a little help or a push, for doing the grunt work without any recognition, and not killing me when I'm up until 2AM arguing with Pagemaker. Laurie, by the way, left NeXT Computer after a few months of continuing lack of support from management in her attempts to get her job done. On the positive side, she's now working for Apple as well and having a lot of fun trying to figure out neat new ways to make NFS throw up on the Cray and other computers over in engineering. If you want to send her E-mail, she's at lsefton@apple.com, Compuserve 74010,3542 or Delphi: LSEFTON. Which makes both of us happy and fixes the problem of not being able to tell each other what we did at work during the day (working for competitors can be fun. For a while...). Futures.... As of this issue, I've gone back to photocopy. Offset printing is really nice, but it's also expensive enough at my printrun to make it worth switching back. If OtherRealms ever hits 800 or 900 copies (which I hope it never does, not for a long time!) I'll have to switch back out of self preservation, but for now I'm always running out of pages long before I run out of material and it just doesn't make sense. I can print more pages of material cheaper with photocopy for now, so that's what I'm going to do. This involved some tweaking of the layout to allow for a slightly larger font so everything didn't turn to a grey mush on the page, but I won't bore you with details since desktop publishing jargon is boring except to the desktop publisher. From what I can tell so far, it should be a fine looking issue of about 60 pages. Material Wanted With the relaxation of the page count restrictions, I'm once again hoping to publish material I had to put aside: interviews, bibliographies, factual science articles (especially with an angle towards helping people understand or better write SF and Fantasy) and more unusual items. On all of this, please query the appropriate editor so we can schedule it in. The Behind the Scenes section is still available as well, and we have commitments from both John ("Deep Quarry") Stith and Elizabeth ("The Sheepfarmer's Daughter") for articles in upcoming issues. I would really like to see more material on the history of SF and classic works, especially on the Fantasy side where the classics are less well-known and harder to find. Techie Tallk Starting this issue, I've switched from Ready, Set, Go! to Pagemaker. The main reason was a series of crashes and bugs in RSG 4.5 (one of which literally ate my hard disk last issue) and a lack of responsiveness from the software manufacturer. I finally got tired of it. Fortunately, Pagemaker is a really neat, powerful program that let me get things done a lot faster than I could with RSG. Also this issue has been put together on a new computer. Out of sheer necessity (and a nice employee discount) I've upgraded MacDuff (an original 128K Mac with lots of added features) to a Mac II. Part of the reason there wasn't a summer issue was that Laurie's Macintosh blew a power supply, followed a week later by my hard disk going *poof* and refusing to work any more. The hard disk was a Jasmine drive, and Jasmine took three weeks to get me an estimate for repair; said estimate was almost big enough to allow me to buy a brand new hard disk (85% of the cost of a new drive). I declined their generous offer and put the money into a 4Megabyte MacII with a 40Meg hard disk. Jasmine then took six weeks more to return the hard disk to me (nine weeks total turnaround to do absolutely nothing). For someone who depends on a hard disk, these kinds of numbers are deadly, so I'm unloading what's left of my Jasmine hardware and upgrading to some other vendor. These times for repair are typical according to other Jasmine owners (and ex-owners) that I've talked to, so if you're looking for hardware, think about it before you buy Jasmine. Even if it's under warranty, can you live without it for a month? Working at Apple has given me access to lots of neat toys, the most interesting (for OtherRealms readers, at least) being a scanner and OCR software. I played with the scanner a bit last issue, but this issue all of the art was scanned in and laid out electronically. I'm generally very happy with the reproductive quality and it gives me the ability to resize and position the artwork more precisely. It also reduces the amount of post-DTP layout work I need to do, which is nice. On the downside, though, this issue is going to use up over 15 megabytes of hard disk before I'm done, perhaps 20. Which is a lot of data. It wouldn't have been possible without the new Macintosh, and not something everyone can (or should -- scanning is something that takes practice to do well, I found out) do. But it was fun learning how to integrate the new functionality into the issue. OCR (Optical Scanning Recognition) software, by the way, is software that reads a page of text and turns it into ascii characters. It lets the computer do the data entry for me. I'm just starting to really experiment with it, but the results have been encouraging. It's a faster typist than I am, and it is a lot easier (and faster) to correct the OCR errors than type it in and then correct my own typing errors. Finally.... A note to OtherRealms authors and artists. As of this issue, I have completely cleared out my backlog of reviews and articles sent to me prior to August 1 of this year. I have, unfortunately, suffered a couple of catastrophic disk crashes in the last year and one of them happened while I had a bad set of backups, so I lost various files including a couple of pending articles. This note is just to let you know that if you are expecting me to publish something and it hasn't shown up, it's gone to the great byte-bucket in the sky and it needs to be resubmitted. I've taken steps to keep this from happening again in the future, but that just means Sir Murphy will become more ingenious next time.... For the artists, I current have a large inventory of material -- enough for the next three or four issues. Since I hate keeping things in inventory for a long time, I'm asking that you consider OtherRealms a closed market until the first of the year to give me a chance to use up some of the stuff I've been holding too long. I like to get things published in as short a time as possible, but I'm getting more material than I can use and need to balance things up a bit. I would also be interested in feedback from artists about the quality of the reproduction of the scanned art -- it may be good enough for me, but if it isn't good enough for the artists, it isn't good enough and I'll go back to the old ways of X-acto knives, waxers and Band-Aids. See you next issue! ------ End ------