Electronic OtherRealms #29 Winter, 1991 Part 1 of 10 Copyright 1991 by Chuq Von Rospach All Rights Reserved. OtherRealms may be distributed electronically only in the original form and with copyrights, credits and return addresses intact. OtherRealms may be reproduced in printed form only for your personal use. No part of OtherRealms may be reprinted or used in any other publication without permission of the author. All rights to material published in OtherRealms hereby revert to the author. Table of Contents: Part 1 Editor's Notebook Chuq Von Rospach Part 2 I'm Not a Nice Girl Laurie Sefton Behind the Scenes: A Chronicle of Deverry Katherine Kerr Part 3 Scattered Gold Charles de Lint Much Rejoicing Dan'l Danehy-Oakes Part 4 Interview with an Anarchist: Lewis Shiner Alan Wexelblat Part 5 Past Imagining Lawrence Watt-Evans Fantasy in the Mainstream: The Novels of Olaf Stapledon Chuck Koelbel Walter Jon Williams: Bibliography Walter Jon Williams Part 6 From Beyond the Edge: Reviews (part 1 of 2) Part 7 From Beyond the Edge: Reviews (part 2 of 2) Part 8 Flights of Fantasy Reviews by Laurie Sefton P.J. Plauger Mitch Wagner Part 9 Words of Wizdom Reviews by Chuq Von Rospach Part 10 Your Turn: Letters from our readers The Masthead: subscription, copyright and administrative trivia Editor's Notebook Coments and Ramblings from Chuq Von Rospach My new job No, I haven't left Apple -- I'm not sure they could kick me out if they wanted to. But since we last talked, some things have changed. I'm now one of the three book reviewers for the new Amazing Science Fiction. I've committed to reviewing four books a month, twelve times a year for the duration. I'm both thrilled and cautious about this. Thrilled to actually be paid for reading and reviewing books; cautious because this is the sort of thing you just can't slip a couple of weeks if life gets too busy -- unlike OtherRealms. You notice that OtherRealms, which was scheduled for January, is late. Part of the lateness was caused by my new position, since I needed to get up to speed and start reading. One habit I had with OtherRealms was that when schedules got tight, I'd simply stop reading for a while, and then perhaps catch up on ten or 15 books in a couple of weeks before writing my Words of Wizdom column. that works when you're quarterly, but now I *have* to read six or seven books a month to make sure I fill the column, and perhaps build up a backlog of reviews so I'm not always on the edge. This is naturally going to affect OtherRealms. It already is. What it's ultimately going to do to OtherRealms I don't know yet. I still think three issues a year is reasonable, but I'm also a hopeless optimist. Between work, the Amazing column, my real writing, Laurie's going back to school (which doesn't affect me directly [except I've been warned I WILL be cooking dinner on a regular basis], but she has put a lot of time and energy both into OtherRealms and into doing things that allow me to spend time on this beast that otherwise would have gone to boring projects like vacuuming) and the further resurgence of some of my non-fannish interests, I have to realize that there's a finite amount of time and an infinite number of projects. OR is still an important part of my life -- but I also have to realize that it's not the only thing I'm responsible for any more and plan accordingly. This is not, definitely not, the sounding of OR's death knell. The electronic issue goes away next issue, but I'm not foreshadowing the death of the rest. Just a warning that schedules are going to be 'flexible.' My apologies in advance for this to all my readers. Things that I get paid for take priority on my time over things that don't. That is a necessary fact of life. Going to work for Amazing has other implications. Reviews that I'm paid for won't be published here in OtherRealms, so my Wizdom column is going to shrink. I'm going to have to depend more on other people to keep the focus on books. My writing in here has been shifting to a more personal focus over the last few issues as it is, and this is going to accelerate it. For those that don't like that, well, sorry. You CAN read Amazing SF and get my reviews, as well as those by John Bunnell and John Betancourt. So far, (one and a half columns into this new relationship) we seem to be a pretty good team -- we're trying to avoid duplicating reviews, and so far, our tastes all differ enough that there's been no real fighting over who gets what title, which is good. It feels damn good, by the way, to get paid for reviewing -- even though it's hard work. After 29 issues of OtherRealms, six years of pushing myself out into the world on my own, it's nice to know someone else thinks enough of me to publish this stuff for me. The money's nice, too -- not exactly Spider Robinson's "Cheese sandwiches and exposure" from his reviewing days (it's more like tunafish, and the exposure IS nice....). Now, if I can just get some of my fiction sold. And some new toys I mentioned my resurgent hobbies above. A couple of things have been taking more of my time and energy. One is the garden. Earlier this month I planted three trees and five rose bushes, which means that about 80% of the back yard has now been rehabilitated and the major foliage planted. When we moved in two years ago, we moved into a house that had (literally) not been maintained for ten years -- what hadn't died was overgrown and needed to either be cut way back or (mostly) simply pulled out. Digging in the dirt is a great way for me to get away from computers for a while (I spend all day with them -- there are times when coming home and 'relaxing' with computers is not what I want to do), plus I enjoy watching an entire living space slowly reshape itself. A couple of weeks later, the roses have budded out, the trees are getting ready, last year's raspberries are starting to leaf and there's unripe fruit on the strawberries. Laurie has tomatoes under the lights in the garage and this weekend I should be installing a new low-flow sprinkler system in the raised beds (we HAVE been busy out there). If things work out, we should be able to spend much of the summer enjoying the back yard instead of weeding it. One hopes. Since last issue, I've picked up a couple of new techie-toys, too. Last issue I talked about a new Shortwave radio, which I've since bought -- a Kenwood R5000. Most nights when I'm working I tune in the BBC World Service, since I get much better news from them than I get from American media. One of the neat features of the R5000 is an RS232 port, so I'm working on a Hypercard stack that will control the radio and let me handle most of the frequency and control stuff from the computer. Why? Well, it's fun and it's nice to be programming again. Another toy, this time for the computer, is a Syquest 45 megabyte removable drive. For about $1.50 a megabyte, I now have a potentially unlimited amount of disk space simply by swapping out cartridges. I was chronically tight on room on my regular hard disk until I got it, but now I've got a lot of flexibility. One of the things I've done is load the text of all issues of OtherRealms onto a cartridge, and then I've used a tool called "On Location" to index it. On Location allows me to type in strings and find out exactly where those strings are in any of the indexed files, so I can look up anything in previous issues quickly and without any real delay or hassle. I'd originally planned on building a Hypercard stack to do this, but with On Location, I don't need to. Isn't technology wonderful? What's scary: When I was starting out in the computer industry, the "home computer" state of the art was the IMSAI 8080 (mine had 8K of RAM, 5K of ROM and a cassette interface). My work computer was a studly PDP11-34 running RSTS, and state of the art in disk storage was a CDC drive the size of a small washing machine that stored an entire 80 megabytes of data. Now, 15 years later, my "obsolete" Mac II (which now has eight megabytes of RAM and 128K of ROM) has more power than that PDP11 did, and I own a disk that, for a total price of $600 (drive and two cartridges) stores as much as that old CDC drive did, is faster and is about the size of a Stephen King book in hardcover. Where are we going to be in another 15 years? When you stop and think about how far computers have come, the mind simply refuses to accept the significance of the changes. One hint on where we're going: Go systems, who just gave the world a first look at their new pen-based computer operating system. It looks awesome and may well be as important a paradigm shift as the Macintosh was (even if you hate the Macintosh, you have to admit that with OS/2, X windows, SunView, Microsoft windows and all of the other Graphical Interfaces, the Mac really made a fundamental change in the way we do computers. Xerox pioneered it, the Mac made it practical and now everyone else is copying it. That's how technology moves forward). War We're at war. This shouldn't come as a great surprise to you. If it is, you haven't been paying attention. It was no surprise to me, either -- but I have to admit that even though I thought I was more or less prepared for the inevitability, when it happened I was still shaken. I watched CNN and ABC like everyone else; for a few days very little got accomplished. It's funny how inconsequential a fanzine deadline can seem when planes are flying over the deserts shooting at each other. I have many mixed feelings about this. I'm heartened that all this very expensive high tech stuff is working as well as it seems to be -- and bothered that we find ourselves in a position to put it through the ultimate field test. I'm very encouraged that so far public support stays high, and very discouraged that Saddam Hussein seems much crazier than anyone gave him credit for and really IS willing to let us pound his entire country into sand and turn himself into a martyr rather than admit he's being overwhelmed. Let us all hope he suffers an accident before major ground fighting casualties begin. Even dead and as a martyr, he will be a force to reckon with in the Middle East, but as long as he lives, the fighting will continue. Scary fact for those people who think America is picking on a tiny country: according to the experts, Iraq has the fourth largest armed forces in the world (the first three being us, USSR and People's Republic of China, not necessarily in that order). At least, they did when this all started, there was a report on the BBC World Service tonight that the British experts no longer believe this to be true, not that you can get decent military casualty information out of either Iraq or the Pentagon. Speaking of which, since last we spoke I went out and bought a Kenwood R5000 receiver, also known as a Shortwave Radio (although it really does much more than the 'shortwave' frequencies). I've been having lots of fun with it, and one of my current projects is to write a Hypercard stack that'll control the thing through its RS232 interface (a radio with a serial port? What will they think of next). I have a number of the basic support functions working, but there are only so many hours in the day.... Anyway, I find I spend much of my time listening to the BBC, which I bring up here to ask whether anyone else has noticed exactly how piss-poor American journalism of the war has been. Once the initial shock of the invasion wore off, I pretty much switched the TV back off -- not because I wanted to avoid the war, but because I'm getting much better information on the shortwave. The quality of reporting on the American media frankly sucks. There has been a lot of criticism thrown at the Pentagon because they've been heavily stonewalling the media. A lot of that stonewalling is true -- try to get any reasonable information on casualties, machinery losses, collateral damage or any information of great substance. On the other hand, we *are* at war, and this is the first war where Pentagon briefings are being beamed behind enemy lines in real time, thanks to communication satellites. The Pentagon has a job to do. That job is NOT keep the media happy, but to get the fighting over with a minimum of allied casualties. Giving Iraq information that can help them fill in the holes in their own intelligence only makes it worse for us, so I can't blame the Pentagon for turning a deaf ear on some topics. I've also been VERY bothered by the frankly poor quality of the questioning. These are supposed to be professional, trained journalists, and yet (as Jim Eason of KGO radio likes to say) the primary questions seem to be of the form "When will the ground war start?" or "How long is this war going to last?" -- worse, a reporter will ask a question and the briefers will say something like "That's an operational (i.e. militarily sensitive) detail and we won't comment" -- and not only does the reporter get snotty because the Pentagon doesn't want to blab secrets to the entire world, the next couple of reporters think that maybe if they slightly rephrase the question, these highly trained Pentagon folks might slip up and tell them something. I haven't really thought much of American mass-media (especially on television) for a long time, but I did better journalistic work for my high school newspaper. It's bush league -- and a number of journalists have taken blatantly adversarial positions against the Pentagon -- which, of course, means the Pentagon is even LESS likely to talk to them. And then they get miffed when the Pentagon won't discuss things with them. Bad journalism made worse by a bad attitude. Thank you, I'll stick with the BBC. The BBC (and to a good degree the British military and media) seem to have a much better attitude about this. I get information about the war from them that shows up on American television a few days later (presumably after THEY've heard it on the BBC). One of the regular programs on the BBC is their daily book reading. Currently, they're reading the Hobbit every night, but right after the troops went to Saudi Arabia, the BBC scheduled "Catch 22" by Joseph Heller. These broadcasts, of course, go to the troops. Coincidence? You won't find that kind of humor in American television. It's too subtle. Let us hope, by the time you read this, that it's all in the past and the rebuilding has begun. Let us hope that sanity reigns and the chemical and biological weapons Hussein have stay unused. Let us hope Hussein doesn't rape and burn Kuwait beyond recovery (if the reported and documented atrocities have any basis in fact, he's doing things even the Nazi's would have flinched at -- whether it be large-scale rape and pillage of Kuwaiti cities or pulling all of the infants out of the incubators of a hospital ward and tossing them on the floor to die so they can carry the hospital gear back to Iraq for the soldiers). Tonight (which is February 12), the BBC is reporting that there are at least 50 oil fields in Kuwait burning, covering much of the country in smoke -- and last week, Hussein was threatening to burn Kuwait to the ground rather than give it up. Which reminds me of something. Earlier this week, Jim Eason on KGO radio (talk/news here in the Bay Area) had someone call up and take the allies to task for allowing Hussein to cause that major oil slick from the Kuwaiti tanker port. We knew it was going to happen, he said, and we should have stopped it. Eason responded quite simply: "What should we have done?" "We knew it was going to happen. We should have done something." How's that for thinking? If you're going to criticize, at least pretend to come up with alternatives. If the war is so terrible, what are the alternatives to fixing the situation? If we should have stopped Iraq from trashing the ocean, how should we have done it? We weren't exactly invited guests at that oil terminal when they opened the drainspouts. Don't just complain. Don't just criticize. Criticize constructively. It's easy to say "you're wrong" -- but it's really tough to say "Here's a better way". Sometimes, it just doesn't exist. It should be obvious I support the way -- not because I like it, but because I see it as a necessary evil, a lesser evil than leaving Saddam Hussein and his terrorism, his regional bullying, his nuclear and chemical and biological weapons -- and his crazy bugfuck attitude. He is, bar none, the most dangerous man to come to power since Hitler, and as long as he is in power the entire world is in significant risk. The war is a nasty thing -- but to not deal with this man, I feel strongly that we would simply have to deal with him later from a great disadvantage. He sees no problem in killing thousands of innocents in Kuwait -- he sees nothing in throwing tens of thousands of his own supporters to their death -- for little more than the protection of his macho sense of power. This war is meaningless. Any sane person would have run like hell when the first bombs came calling. That Saddam Hussein not only continues to fight, but continues to try to escalate the war and scream his rhetoric only proves the man is not sane and that his power must be terminated. I haven't even mentioned his random attacks of terrorism at Israel with his SCUD missiles (all the while calling the U.S. for 'war crimes' for attacking citizens of Iraq. We ARE at war with Iraq -- what's his excuse with Israel?). Saddam must go if we have any hope for long term peace in that region. War is Hell, literally, but sometimes necessary. The difference between me and a peace-activist is that I see war as a terrible alternative and a peace activist sees war as the worst possible alternative. Having seen the results of Nazi Germany against its neighbors, I don't think we can sit idly by this time. Go study the attack against Poland and Czechoslovakia; go study the Holocaust -- then try to imagine a scenario where the U.S. doesn't play isolationist until long after Hitler had a major power base through the bowels of Europe. Answer: if the U.S. had gotten involved in WWII early, there's a good chance, a very good chance that Hitler would have been stopped, Europe would not have been ripped to pieces and the Holocaust would not have happened. Sometimes you have to stand up and stop the tyrants. Waiting until the Holocausts have happened to stop them doesn't make the dead people feel better. I know some of you out there disagree with me on this. That's your right as an American (on the other hand, if you lived in Iraq and publicly disagreed with Saddam Hussein, you'd be dead. Isn't it nice to live in a country that tolerates dissent?) I certainly don't mind people disagreeing. I only get upset when people disagree unthinkingly. You can't understand a situation from the evening news or what you read in the first two paragraphs of the newspaper (which is all the vast majority of newspaper readers read; isn't THAT depressing) or from some catchy but meaningless protest slogans. Go study the situation -- read up on Hussein's history (did you know he came to power as an official state torturer?) and what he's done to Kuwait. Go study the first few years of WWII and Hitler's decimation of the Poles. If you still can't support war, bless you -- at least you thought. The only thing an unthinking patriot and an unthinking anti-patriot have is that they're both blind to reality. "Real" patriots think America does nothing wrong and we should always be loved and obeyed blindly (forgetting that dissent is a primary aspect of the freedoms we fought to gain in our independence from England); "Real" anti-patriots think America never does anything right and if they're involved, they must be the bad guys. I have no sympathy for either the "Love it or leave it" crowd or the "America is scum" crowd. I make up my mind on a case by case basis -- and that's all I ask of others. Unfortunately, I find that most folks prefer falling behind easy platitudes. That way they don't have to think for themselves. I don't care if you're for or against the war, as long as you look the situation over, study the facts and decide for yourself. Think about it. Think. "Blind" Hubble Remember how the major media "proved" to us how worthless and screwed up the Hubble was? It was fun to bash NASA about the screwups. Good, easy press. Bad news sells newspapers and toilet paper, after all. Well, it didn't take long for the scientists to figure out it wasn't all that bad. The Hubble wasn't blind, just nearsighted. That, of course, was on page 17, not page 1. And now this -- in the 1-Feb-91 issue of Science -- the tuning and calibration is done on the Hubble and the actual research is starting, and the Hubble is "only" 10 times clearer than anything we can get from the ground. "Only" 10 times better. Now, it *should* be much better than that. I'm not downplaying the screwups that caused us to ship Mister Magoo up to sky. But think about it. The media made a hey-day on how this was a billion dollar piece of useless junk. Now that it's turning out (already!) data that's revolutionizing astronomy, where do you think the media is? Have you seen any "well, maybe it's not as bad as we thought" pieces on page one of your local newspaper? Or were they buried behind the commodity prices? Environmental Pop Quiz Quick pop quiz. What's less harmful to the environment: a paper coffee cup or a foam coffee cup? All of you who said paper cups -- guess what? It looks like you're wrong. Martin Hocking from the University of British Columbia (again in the 1-Feb-91 Science, if you want the full details) has done a study of the total environmental impact of your average, everyday "green" paper cup and compared it to the nasty, environmentally ugly foam cup. The results are fairly stunning -- the polyfoam cup is not only less expensive to produce, but it creates many fewer pollutants in the process and uses fewer resources. It is also, on the recovery end, much cleaner to deal with. For instance, in raw materials, a paper cup requires 33 grams of wood pulp. Surprisingly, it ALSO requires 4.1 grams of petroleum products (primarily fuels used for energy in the creation process, and that specifically excludes the plastic or wax coating -- just the paper) and 1.8 grams of others chemicals (including sodium sulfate, sodium hydroxide, chlorine, sulfuric acid and sulfur dioxide). The polyfoam cup uses 3.2g of petroleum products and 0.05 grams of other chemicals per cup. The weight of the paper cup is 10.1 grams, the foam cup 1.5 grams. Surprise #1: you use MORE hydrocarbons to create a paper cup than you do to create a hydrocarbon-based foam cup. Plus you have to add in the paper, plus a fair number of fairly noxious (and ecologically nasty) chemicals during the paper pulping and pressing and bleaching processes. Surprise #2: energy usage. Total energy usage to create paper cups is about 9000-12000 kilogram of steam and 980 KilowattHours per metric ton, vs. about 5000 kilogram of steam and 120-180 KwH for polyfoam. Also note how many fewer cups you get per metric ton -- it takes about 6 metric tons of paper to match one metric ton of polyfoam. You're using a LOT more energy to make "green" paper cups. How about pollutants? For every metric ton of paper, we're creating 50-190 cubic meters of contaminated effluent that's being dumped into our lakes and rivers. These include sulfuric acid, chlorine and significant amounts of biological material that, when released into from the plant, will break down and use significant amounts of the free oxygen in the water, possibly choking out the wildlife and plants. On the other hand, polyfoam causes under 2 cubic meters of water effluent with essentially no chemical or organic content. Surprise #3: paper processing is a highly polluting process that causes significant damage to the local water system unless very carefully monitored and unless expensive pollution controls exist (and even then there are still hassles). Just ask anyone who lives downstream of a paper plant how "green" they are. But the *big* problem with polyfoam is that it releases lots of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, right? That's why everyone screams? (that and the use of hydrocarbons). Surprise #4: A metric ton of polyfoam will cause the release of 35-50 Kilograms of Pentane, which has replaced CFCs as the chemical of choice in the manufacturing process. Pentane has been shown to increase ozone, both in low and high atmosphere studies. On the other hand, Pentane also has a maximum life of about seven years, after which it's broken down and gone. So paper cups help prevent global warming, then, right? Well.... Instead of Pentane, creation of a metric ton of paper causes 5 to 15 kilograms of particulates to be released in the air (i.e. smog). Also measurable amounts of Chlorine, Chlorine dioxide, sulfides and sulfur dioxide. So during the creation process, polyfoam is somewhat more polluting, but is dispersing stuff that is fairly short-lived and relatively benign (unlike the older CFCs, and definitely unlike things like Chlorine). But we aren't done yet. What about when we're done: those foam cups will live forever, clogging our landfill, right? Surprise #5: polyfoam is highly recyclable. In fact, McDonalds had invested three years in building a system that would take the majority of the polyfoam in its containers and recycle it -- they were about to put the program in place when some "green" activists started a major publicity campaign against them that forced them to trash all of that work, all of their polyfoam and switch over to "green" paper products. It would have been a model program in the effective re-use of previously disposable material. Instead, they were threatened with a smear campaign and forced to switch to "green" paper products, the production of which is a highly polluting process. But you can recycle paper, right? Well, *some* paper. Coffee cups aren't recyclable, because they're put together with a type of glue that can't be removed during the repulping process. Same with all the food service papers that use wax or plastic coatings to protect the food. Newsprint is recyclable, but we don't wrap food in newspaper in the U.S. Surprise #6: instead of building recycling programs for polyfoam, we're chopping down trees, using up as much hydrocarbon as they would for foam, create more (and nastier) pollutants, all so we can haul the paper off to the landfill. Where it sits. Surprise #7: they've been digging up landfills and trying to figure out what goes on inside them. Guess what? They're finding out that "biodegradable" paper, when placed in a landfill, generally sits there, essentially inert. Just like polyfoam. They've dug up forty and fifty year old newspapers -- that were still easily readable. Large chunks of landfills just sit there and never do anything. Just as if they were full of plastic or polyfoam. The parts that DO degrade generate methane and carbon dioxide. Guess what? Methane and Carbon Dioxide are greenhouse gasses, and Methane is essentially equivalent to Pentane as far as greenhouse response is concerned. Worse, you only have to degrade 2% of the paper to generate as much methane as the equivalent amount Pentane released in polyfoam creation. So you better hope that 98% of that paper doesn't degrade, or it's going to do worse things than the polyfoam did in the first place. We won't even mention the runoff from the landfill contaminating the water table (which won't happen with polyfoam, since it doesn't degrade and cause noxious runoff). And if you burn that paper? You get lots of carbon dioxide, particulates and other random chemicals. Look, everyone "knows" that paper is better for the environment. Everyone "knows" that petrochemicals pollute. Everyone knows that to be socially conscious you have to use "green" recyclable products and convince others to do the same. The problem is, what everyone "knows" isn't always right. Drilling for oil is a relatively benign operation -- until it leaks. Clearcutting trees is always disastrous for the local environment and butt-ugly to boot. A "green" product like paper sounds great -- trees are a renewable resource, right? But when you look at the total cost -- collection of raw materials, processing, use and disposal, some fascinating realities pop in. What we all know ain't always so. The McDonalds program could have been the first step in a nationwide move by Corporate America to move towards intelligent disposal of their discards. Instead, they were coerced by the "environmentalists" to drop all that and move to a product that is significantly more damaging to the environment and uses much more energy and resource in the creation -- and is just as difficult, if not more difficult, to dispose of. All in the name of "saving our environment". Isn't this stupid? The point of this diatribe is this: being careful in the treatment of this planet is crucial to our long-term survival. But it's just as critical that we deal in facts and we do what science has shown is necessary. The state of the environmental movement these days is that a relatively small pressure group comes up with an emotionally powerful position and coerces people into conforming or facing what can be a terrible PR disaster for a company. I mean, we all "know" that paper is better than plastic, right? Except the science is clearly showing that's not true. I wonder what else we "know" about the environment, what policies we're putting in place, that are making it worse because people are moving through emotion or political expediency and not the facts? Think about it. What do you know is right? And why? Has it really been proved? Or are we working with Old Wives Tales again? Price Increase update Last issue I announced an upcoming price increase in OtherRealms subscriptions. Because of all sorts of things, I still haven't decided what to do, so this is on hold. Even though postage has gone up, until I finalize this, I'm not changing anything, so the old rates will continue to apply indefinitely. Dial 1-800-HI-PIERS Are you a Piers Anthony fan? If so, you probably should know about Valet Publishing, a new organization set up by Anthony specifically to sell and market his books. They're putting out a newsletter all about him that is available on a quarterly basis for only $7.50. He's also set up the Xanth Trading Post so you can mail order your favorite Piers Anthony stuff. You can get more information by calling 1-800-HI-PIERS. I take this as an indication of just how popular Anthony has gotten with his fans. We've had all sorts of stars and superstars in the SF field over the years, but as far as I know, this is the first author with his very own 800 number. Obviously, someone likes his stuff (but I wonder why....) Next Issue Is issue 30, which I think will be something special. At the very least, different. More than that I'm not going to say. My hopeful schedule is early April, but since I'm writing this in mid-February, I wouldn't hold my breath. Please remember that issue 30 is the final issue that will be distributed on-line -- and people who want to get back issues on-line should note that I'll be removing the archives on apple.com (anonymous ftp, directory pub/otherrealms) about a month after issue 30 ships. See you next issue! ------ End ------