Mo Starkey gives us a cover that makes me slightly affraid... I find it especially funny that the comments from me on Is-sue 300 are in issue 299. I am always working on keeping those fu-ture Fan Historians on their toes! I always zig just when they think I’m going to zap. I love the issue. It’s the best thing I’ve ever been involved with. It’s full of writers I respect and love, it’s got articles on stuff that I think is amazing and I got to read it all a long time ago. There’s art that I think is awesome, a cover that makes me ULTRA-SMILE!!!!! There’s a brilliant piece of comic work from Ric Bretschneider right at the end, and there’s stuff from folks who’ve never sent anything to a zine before. James really outdid himself. James “I’ll-Ask-Anyone-For-Anything” Bacon is a stud, and he got roughly half the folks in the issue. It never would have hap-pened without him. He’s the best co-editor you could ask for! And you know, I’ve got some favorites. Yes, I’ve got favor-ites. Who wouldn’t? I love Tara O’Shea’s Love Letter to Raymond Chandler, largely because I am a giant Mystery mark, Sean Gorman’s piece on The War to Settle the Score and Mike Quackenbush’s piece on the These Days Ten Man Match, two of the best pieces about the love of wrestling you’ll ever read, Tanya Adolfson’s How To Light Someone on Fire, one of the best 52 Weeks pieces to date from Warren Buff and Ric Bretschneider’s re-writing of history for the comic mixed in with the bios. And the Bios were all so much fun to write! Lots of greatart in this one, from Steve Sprinkles wonderful cover, to all the art from my new Holy Trin-ity: Sue Mason, Mo Starkey and Delphyn Woods to the Norah Ding work, which really worked for me because it showed that no matter what the generation, there’s a thing for spaceships! Her Mom, Kylie, mentioned that when Norah saw it she said, “But it wasn’t done!” Striving for perfection from a young age! While I was writing the bios, I realized that the group of folks who had submitted were all good folks with impeccable credentials and awesomeness. There were Hugo Winners in six categories (Best Fan Writer, Scalzi and Brialey, Best Fanzine – James and Randy Byers, Best Fan Artist – Brad Foster, Delphyn, Joe Mayhew, Sue Ma-son, Best Other Forms – Alan Moore, Best Related Work – Tara O’Shea, Scalzi, Best Professional Artist – Michael Whelan) as well as a couple of Nebula winners, I think a Sidewise, a few WorldCon Chairs, a Few WorldCon GoHs, a bunch of folks who are just flat awesome, and quite a few TAFF/DUFF/GUFF winners. It’s a great list of folks, and on and on. It was a pleasure to get to put the thing together, and it’ll be a chore to go about fixing the minor guffs I made in putting it together. Also, one or two of the major ones., including a piece from Cory Doctorow that somehow slipped through my fingers... I had hoped to have LoCs to issue 300 in here, but alas, it’s such a big issue, it’s not easy to LoC and my readers (and certainly the new-comers) aren’t really LoCers. There were some great mentions on Twitter and Facebook! This issue features a piece on the recent death of Anne McCaffrey, who was a major influence on so many people I’ve known over the years. I’m so glad that I had a chance to get to chat with her. We’ve also got a fine piece from Taral Wayne, and of course, 52 Weeks to Science Fiction Film Literacy on... Star Wars. Star Wars is a HUGE part of my love of film, and I’ve been looking forward to the issue where we get to talk about it. I’m hoping that I managed to do it justice. It changed the world, well, the world of film, and writing about it is actually a little bit tough. I am rather incensed by the release of a NEW IMPROVED Star Wars on DVD, re-edited and changed again as Lucas loses focus on what made the Original films so great. Oh, the Blu-Ray editions are still on my Christmas list, but what are you gonna do?

No. 321 - Cory Doctorow

The problem with asking someone who’s established in the field for advice on breaking in is that I broke into a different field. I sold my first story to a little magazine when I was 17 -- 23 years ago! -- and back then, there was no such thing as electronic publishing, there were 5x more publishers in NYC, 10x more maga-zines, etc. The way I broke into the field was very unspectacular. I wrote stories and sent them to magazines. I read all the magazines, and I knew which ones would potentially publish my work. I’d start with thehighest-paying magazines and work my way down as each story was rejected. A decade elapsed between the day I put my first ms in the mail to the day I made my first pro-rate sale. It took 5 more years for myfirst novel to appear in print, bought by an editor who liked my short fiction and was impressed by the awards it had won. I went to a few sf conventions and met editors, which was nice, because they were good people, but it didn’t sell any fiction. I also attended the Clarion SF writing workshop, which was an amazing boot-camp experience that really helped me improve my writing. I met with a group of local writers once a week and we reviewed each others’ manuscripts. Some of that method (such as it is) still applies. But there aren’t a lot of magazines left, and they’re not very widely read, though the online markets have picked up a lot of the slack. My advice, then: 1. Write, finish what you write, edit what you finish (after you finish it, don’t try to edit as you go). If you can find a local workshop of writers you like who are at about the same place in their careers as you, join it and participate, remembering that chances are you’ll get more out of critiquing others’ works than you will out of their critiques.

2. Read the markets you want to sell to. Figure out whether you’re writing their kind of stuff. If you are, send your finished stuff to them in the format they specify (a lot of people flub this). When you get rejected, try

another market. Don’t send a story to more than one market at once unless they say that they allow simultaneous submissions (most don’t).

3. Write the stuff you love. There’s practically no money in this. It takes forever. If you’re not getting artistic satisfaction out of it, you’re wasting your time.

4. Preservere. For most people, this process takes a long, long time. Most of us have 1,000,000 words of crap in us, and the only way to get it out is to write it down.

5. Write every day. Writing is a muscle. The more you do it, the easier it gets to do.

I know that this is kind of generic, but that’s as good as I’ve got. It’s sincerely the best and only method I know to become a career writer (even if it doesn’t always work -- some people give up, or never get good enough to see print).

No. 322 - Photo from Jerry Majors!

In my family, there are four things that matter: board games, amusement parks, movies, and Harry Pot-ter. That’s the glue that holds my family together. And we’re serious about all of those parts – games turn into fierce competition, often getting vicious as we try to sabotage the other team; my cousin (who originally entered mechanical engineering in order to be a roller coaster designer) gives detailed analysis of every roller coaster he’s ridden; we see as many Oscar-worthy (or Disney) movies we can; and we discuss Harry Potter endlessly. So, naturally, we were going to have to make our way to the Wizarding World of Harry Potter at Universal’s Islands of Adventure in Orlando at some point. And this Thanksgiving, we finally did. Just inside the entrance to the Wizarding World is the Hogwart’s Express, scarlet and gold, sitting majesti-cally in front of Hogsmeade. Sometimes there’s a line to even enter the park – we didn’t have to wait. As I walked under the stone archway and into Hogsmeade, I was struck by one thing: a feeling of total immersion into the world. With the peaked roofs of Hogsmeade towering above my head, Hogwarts beckoning in the distance, it was easy to forget that I was in Orlando. It easily could have been a November day in Scotland, not Florida. Well, expect for the 80 degree heat. And the overwhelming crowds. Immediately after entering Hogsmeade, we turned left into Zonko’s. Of the various attractions, it was easily the most disappointing. There were very few items available for purchase that were unique to the Harry Potter world. Most of it was standard joke shop fair – snakes jumping out of cans, wind-up chattering teeth, a Jacob’s Ladder. The displays above my head weren’t much better; they didn’t feel all that wizarding. However, as I stepped into Honeyduke’s (which is connected to Zonko’s on the inside), I saw the spec-tacle I had been expecting. The shop was exquisitely themed, with bright colors, shelves and shelves of candy, and even a spiral staircase heading up into the attic. The candies for sale were not just the typical fare that I could find

The Wizarding World of Harry PotterBy Jesi Lipp

at the candy store near my house, but a ridiculous amount of Wizarding candy as well. The chocolate frogs and Bertie Bott’s Every Flavor Beans were ex-pected. But there was also Ton-Tongue Toffee, Pep-permint Toads, Fizzing Whizbees, Chocolate Caul-drons, Pepper Imps, Sugar Quills, Chocolate Wands, Exploding BonBons, and Cauldron Cakes. My eyes immediately lit upon a jar of lemon drops, my favor-ite sweet. They said they were sherbet lemons, but they were not. The two treats are actually differ-ent. The confusion is caused because the American publisher of the books didn’t think American read-ers would know what a sherbet lemon was (they were probably right), so the treat was changed to a lemon drop. We continued wandering through Hogsmeade, stopping to look in at all the shops. Most of them weren’t shops that were actually open to the public, but they had amazing window displays: a young Mandrake, a Mimbulus Mimbleto-nia, a display of Gilderoy Lockhart books, a collec-tion of wizarding oddities, mannequins with formal wear (perhaps for an upcoming Yule Ball?). We stopped into The Three Broomsticks for lunch. The food was surprisingly good – the roasted chicken and potatoes was good, the corn on the cob was great, and the barbeque ribs were fairly decent for not being from Kansas City. Obviously, if you want good barbeque, come to my city and I’ll show you the best joints in town. But if you’re crav-ing barbeque while at Universal, the ribs will do you just fine. The highlight of The Three Broomsticks, of course, isn’t the food. It’s the drinks. Butterbeer (non-alcoholic) tastes like a cross between a rootbeer float and cream soda. I don’t like either, so I wasn’t a fan. The frozen but-terbeer tastes the same, just colder. The apple and pear cider (non-alcoholic) was good; the pear cider was better than the apple. My personal favorite was the pumpkin juice and the pumpkin fizz (pumpkin juice with some carbonation). It tastes like a heav-ily spiced mulled apple cider with a good dose of pumpkin in it. I drank several cups of the pumpkin fizz, and bought a bottle of pumpkin juice for break-fast the following morning. For those inclined to-ward the alcoholic, there are two options. You can either have the shitty domestic beer, or the Hog’s Head Brew, which is brewed especially for the park and only available in the Three Broomsticks or The Hog’s Head. I’m not a beer person, but my fiancée,

Top - The Hogsmeade CrowdMiddle - A Quidditch Set

Bottom - The House Points Score Tubes

who homebrews, said the beer was quite good – a full-bodied ale that was very easy to drink. Continuing our way through Hogsmeade, we decided to do the Ollivander’s Wand Experience. The line was a forty-five minute wait. While in line, we chatted with the conductor of the Hogwarts Express. He’s a very talented actor, prepared to answer any question my sister and I threw at him. According to a guide book I read, he’s the most photographed character in the Universal parks. When we reached the front, a group of twenty or so people came in Ollivander’s. One kid got to try out a couple of wands, with disastrous results. When he was given a wand that was a good fit for him, there was a whooshing throughout the room and the lights flickered. Sound familiar? It’s because it’s exactly what happened in the first movie when Harry gets his wand. The dialogue was verbatim out of the movie, as was the “plot.” Honestly, I don’t think Ollivander’s was worth the wait, but if you can catch the line when it’s shorter, then it’s worth it. If you have a kid who wants to be selected to try a wand, try to be the first group in and have the kid stand right by the bottom of the stairs. After Ollivander’s, we shopped in Dervish and Banges. This shop had a lot of Hogwarts house apparel, along with some Beauxbaton and Durmstrang clothes. There were also stuffed animals, brooms, wands, and some leather goods. I picked up a leather luggage tag holder stamped with “Platform Nine and 3⁄4” that will become a badge holder for me at conventions. Before we hit the rides, we stopped to listen to the Hogwarts Choir. It’s an a capella choir of four students – a soprano, an alto, a tenor, and a beatboxer – two of whom are holding frogs who sing a bass accompaniment (like the choir in the third movie). They sang “Something Wicked This Way Comes” from the third movie and “Dance Like a Hippogriff” from the fourth, as well as several instrumental songs, including “Hedwig’s Theme.” Honestly, they weren’t that great of singers, and it wasn’t worth the fifteen minutes I spent watching them. We ended our six-hour trip with the two big rides (there’s also a little ride for kids called Flight of the Hippogriff). First, we went to the Dragon Challenge. For those of you familiar with Universal, this ride used to be Dueling Dragons. And really, it might as well still be. There’s a little bit of themeing in the line waiting to get to the ride – the Goblet of Fire, the eggs that the champions have to retrieve from the dragon during the First Challenge – but that’s all that’s changed. They didn’t even bother to repaint the ride trains to look like the two dragons they’re supposed to be. It was very clear this ride wasn’t a Hungarian Horntail and a Chinese Fireball; it was still the Fire Dragon and the Ice Dragon. The entire point of Dueling Dragons was that the rides were synced, and there were seven “near misses” during the ride where it looked as though you were going to crash into the

other ride. But apparently people were throwing things at the other train, and so the ride is no longer synced. Don’t get me wrong – it’s still a great roller coaster, but it’s not what it used to be. Finally, we made our way to Harry Potter and the Forbidden Journey, the most anticipated part of our trip. The wait was an hour long (the waits for everything in Harry Potter start out long at the beginning of the day and go down as the day goes on). But the wait isn’t so bad, because the styling in the line was amazing. First, we made our way through the Hogwarts dungeons, passing Snape’s Potions classroom. Then, we entered the green-houses. This is where we spent most of our time in line, and it’s also the most uninteresting part of Hogwarts. Bad design. But, upon exiting the greenhouse, we entered the main halls of Hogwarts. This was easily the best part of the line, but we were being whisked through so quickly, we didn’t have time to appreciate everything as much as we wanted. My mom felt she missed out on a lot of the experience of the line because the ride operators were telling us to keep moving, that we couldn’t stop and look. We passed a statue of Godric Gryffindor, Sorting Hat on his head, followed by the house points counters. We walked through hallways full of wizarding portraits. The portraits of the Founders were having a disagreement on the current state of the school, as well as the usefulness of Muggles. Then, we came into Dumbledore’s office, complete with a pensieve and Dumbledore telling us about the strange sights we may be seeing during our trip to Hogwarts. Next, the line wound through the Defense Against the Dark Arts classroom, where Harry, Ron, and Hermione explained that we would shortly be stuck in a History of Magic lesson with Professor Binns (who is considered to be the most boring professor Hogwarts has ever seen), but that they would help us escape so we could watch a Quidditch match. Both the Defense room and Dumbledore’s office were stunning recreations of the movie sets. Right before we got on the ride, the Sorting Hat gave us the ride warnings (which were also posted on the walls as a notice from the Ministry Department of Magical Games and Sports). The Forbidden Journey isn’t just a ride; it’s an experience. We sat in groups of four, strapped in. An anima-tronic arm holds onto the seat, moving in back and forth and side to side while the arm rolls along a track. All of this simulates feeling of flying as we traveled through Hogwarts and its grounds. The ride uses both projections (such as flying around the Quidditch pitch), and “real” sets (like the Forbidden Forest overrun by the giant spi-ders, acromantulas). The basic story is this: Hermione has cast a charm on the Enchanted Benches, allowing them to fly so that we can escape Hogwarts to see a Quidditch match. Unfortunately, Hagrid managed to lose a dragon, which chases us into the Forbidden Forest, where we have to run away from the acromatulas. We manage to get onto the Quidditch pitch, but dementors show up, ruining the game. As we follow Harry, fleeing the dementors, we end up getting sucked into the Chamber of Secrets, where there are yet more dementors jumping out at us, as well as the carcass of the basilisk Harry slew during his second year. Harry manages to defeat the dementors with his powerful Patronus charm, and we follow him across the lake to the Great Hall of Hogwarts where we are greeted by the cheers and applause of Gryffindors and Dumb-ledore. I’m not sure if I can put into words how much I loved this ride. Throughout it, I was laughing with joy. I really did feel like I was flying across the Hogwarts grounds. For a few brief minutes, I wasn’t a Muggle anymore. The projections, the sets, and the physicalness of the ride blew my mind. Was the story of the ride entirely coherent? No. Did it matter one little bit? No. I came out of the ride and I could not stop ask-ing my family ,“Did that blow your

mind? Was that amazing? I thought that was amazing!” I grew up with Harry Potter. I read the first book when I was eight, and when the final book came out and Harry was seventeen, I was too. Those who know me can attest that I am a genuine Harry Potter freak. I’ll analyze the crap out of the books, tell you how it changed my life and why Snape is the most awesome character in the series. Some days, I’ll tell you he’s the best character to ever grace a page. Both the books and the movies have been major parts of my life, from watching the movies at Thanksgiving with my family, to writing my senior paper on Harry Potter and Joseph Campbell’s Hero Cycle, to going to my father’s grave and reading the seventh book to him because I knew he would need to know how it ended. And I can definitely say that going to the Wizarding World of Harry Potter completely lived up to my expectations and hopes, and then surpassed them. For anyone who loves Harry Potter as much as I do (or for parents who just put up with their child’s obsessions, like my mom), the Wizarding World of Harry Potter will be a wonderful time.

sands of words I committed to the everlasting custodianship of vinyl memory are now as lost to posterity as the scrolls in the Alexandrine Library. One of the earlier manifestations of furry fandom was the Bulletin Board, or BBS. The first Mucks were up and running, and were about as primitive as Pong. They did what was needed, but their non-visual nature never appealed to me. Also, I was temperamentally unsuited to be a role-player. I like to make the rules and decide outcomes for myself – rather than abide by a consensus – so a shared environment is a poor place for me. On the other hand, a Bulletin Board was a means of communication. I had no problem with that and eagerly joined one that was created locally by a friend of mine. Ken was calling himself “Hepzibah” in those days, celebrating his affinity with skunk-kind. In time, there would be far too many “Hepzibahs” in furry fandom, and Ken found a new alter ego, but “Kratsminsch” belongs to another era, along with Twitter, streaming, FurAffinity and other complicating developments. When Ken announced his new Bulletin Board, I was using an older Amiga 1000 of his. It wouldn’t do much, but it would let me log onto “The Trap Line” once I was connected to the Internet. I think I first subscribed to a free server called 3web... which was later bought out by a larger company, that subsequently deleted 3Web from the map of the information highway. (This is called “competition” in Neocon Speak.) From what I had seen of it, “The Trap Line” wasn’t radically different from the Muck. One typed comments to people in much the same way. For that matter, “The Trap Line” wasn’t altogether different from many modern “lists.” There was even a “chat mode” for real-time communication. However, one important difference was that I wasn’t expected to keep up a pretense that I was a talking puppy or a magical fox-girl on “The Trap Line.” For someone with my aversion to appearing silly on purpose, this was a difference that mattered. I never lost any sleep over appearing foolish unintentionally. That simply happens, and all you can do about it is pretend it didn’t. I would amost rather eat raw vegetables in the con suite than be silly on purpose. Chat was one of the more charming features of “The Trap Line.” It made the Bulletin Board a sort of “magic typewriter.” I had been using a typewriter for many years... but they had never before talked back to me. Before familiarity set in (after all, why “chat” when there’s a telephone?) Ken and I used to connect and exchange pointless questions just for the sheer joy of it. For that matter, Ken and I didn’t live very far apart, and we often got together in coffee shops for serious mano-a-mano bullshitting.

Long ago, when comic book shops ruled the land and motion pictures were recorded on tape, the world was a simpler place. Com-modore and Tandy were names with clout in the home computing mar-ket. Bill Gates was quoted as saying that 128 and 256k of RAM memory were quite enough, and nobody would ever need an entire meg for home computing. In many ways, we were a happier tribe of fans in those days. These days, we need many meg of memory just to store our corrected word processor mistakes and Photoshop history. Nor did the early computers deliver on their promise to be a permanent format for our intellectual property. How many users under the age of 30 would even recognize a 51⁄4-inch floppy disk? All those tens of thou-

About that time, the big issue created by the Internet was piracy. Individuals who believed that the Rap-ture had come began posting whatever they liked on websites all over the world. It’s nice to know that some things about the Internet never change... Ken took particular exception to one pirate who – relatively speaking – operated from our backyard. Terry maintained that he was doing the artists a terrific favour by publicizing their work. Whether or not they agreed, or even knew about it, was beside the point in Terry’s view. Ken saw the mat-ter quite differently... as did I, being an artist who was often pirated. For the longest time, Ken and Terry were at each other’s throats. I don’t know whether they ever fought openly online, or merely conducted a guerrilla war of innuendo and back-stabbing. But on our late-night walks to observe wild skunks, Ken expressed his thoughts about Terry in unmistakably fighting language. I was a particular beneficiary of Terry’s “altruism” in those days, and nodded my head sagely to everything Ken said. The odd thing is that Terry did eventually come to see things more our way. And, in time, Ken mellowed toward Terry. I found him a pleasant enough sort of person, as well, and even shared a car with him and Kevin on several long drives to furry cons along the East Coast. So, while piracy is the same problem it always was, both “The Trap Line” and Terry’s “chan” were eventually relegated to the technological scrap heap – and all past injuries were forgiven. Ken and some of the other “Trap Line” regulars held a picnic one year. I believe I missed it. I attended the picnic next summer, though, as well as the picnics each summer after that. They were held in High Park, an ideal location. The park wasn’t very far from where Ken and I lived in Parkdale, but it was next to a stop on the subway station, so it was almost as easy to get to from all parts of the city. The Park was huge. It had been the early 19th-century estate of the Howard family, and spread from Bloor Street all the way to Lakeshore Boulevard – a distance of about a mile and a half. It was half-a-mile wide, and within the grounds were Grenadier Pond, several smaller pools, a creek, a number of isolated little ravines and oddities of all sorts to discover. One of my favourite spots was a ring of stones in a small clearing on the side of a steep slope. The stones were originally from an ornate Edwardian fountain that had been broken up. The gargoyles and fragments of Corinthian capitols had been carted to the site for no apparent reason, and arranged in a Druid’s circle. The ring could not be seen from any of the main paths or roads through the park, only by following one particular, little-used footpath through a dense patch of woods. With so much to see, our picnics usually dissolved into expeditions of discovery after the food was eaten. If darkness had fallen, so much the bet-ter... I only knew a half-dozen of the people at these shindigs, perhaps as many as eight. It could well have been at my first picnic that I met Steven Baldassarra. He was a regular attendee and one of the main benefactors. A disproportionate percentage of us in those days were usually dead broke. Too many of us are likely still broke. I know I am. So, it fell to the largesse of a small number of fans who had the means to bring soft drinks, or a dozen-or-two frozen hamburger patties. The park provided the grills... but unless someone fortunately remembered to bring briquettes, it would be a disappointing affair no matter how many cold burgers and hotdogs there were. Steven even brought a disposable cardboard and aluminum-foil barbecue grill, just to be sure. Almost everyone was able to afford a squirt gun. I don’t know if it became de rigueur from the first picnic or not, but running water-gun fights were in evidence from the first one I attended. I brought my own, after that. Discretion is not the better part of valour if you end up soaking wet and can’t fight back. Filling up was a bit of a nuisance, though. You either had to find a drinking fountain, and patiently wait while most of the water splashed away from the tiny refill hole, or you could walk all the way to one of the maintenance buildings and see if there was a hose tap. But then you’d miss too much of the action. The smart thing to do would probably have been to bring plastic bottles for quick reloading. Perhaps it’s just as well that nobody seemed to have thought of that, or they would have dampened a lot of the fun. Although I did acquire a prodigious and impressive-looking water gun at last, I never got the chance to use it. It was easily three feet long and shipped half a gallon of water. The pump action shot a jet of aqua across a two-lane street, as prettily as a mountain spring – and just as cold, if you added ice cubes to the reservoir. But the gun was also yellow and orange plastic, with purple stickers. I felt like a damn fool carrying it on public streets, so the mother of all monster squirt guns never left my apartment. As one consequence of being unarmed, I tended to sit out the water sports. To be sociable, I developed

other social skills, such as crushing empty Coke cans and tearing them in half with my bare hands. The metal in Canadian pop cans is twice the gauge of flimsy American cans, so if your only exercise is tapping a keyboard and wrestling with a mouse, you may find this tougher than you think. All the same, once there was a small mountain of crumpled and demolished aluminum cans on the table where I sat, the entertainment value of my act fell to nil. Sitting at another corner of the table, I noticed an artist whose name I didn’t know. He was doodling on a scrap of paper rescued from starting the barbecue, and had rendered a fully detailed figure on it that was no more than an inch high. I said that I sometimes amused myself in the same fashion. When called for, in fact, a lot of my art has quite amazing amounts of detail crammed into very small spaces. We began a contest to see who could draw the smallest. I went to bat first, and turned in a figure drawing that measured a mere half-inch from end to end. When it was his turn, my worthy adversary drew a figure only a quarter-of-an-inch long. Then we were down to eighths-of-an-inch.

I don’t recall who won, but the contest’s possibilities were limited only by the unnecessarily crude physi-cal dimensions of the ball on a fine-tip pen. The final round of drawings were nearly microscopic, measuring only one or two millimeters in length – almost small enough to fit on the head of a pin. In a larger sense, though, a case can be made that our contest’s diminishing returns were prophetic. The picnics we held on those halcyon summer days may well have been the culmination of that generation’s furry fandom in Toronto. There would be parties at the local SF con that spurred talk about a con of our own... but little would come of it. After a while, fans from the Greater Toronto Area who used to get together with us at the Hoy Ching stopped coming. The “Trap Line’s” once considerable stature diminished as the Internet grew. One day, it just wasn’t there anymore, and its absence was hardly noticed. Ken said he wanted to run his own server and turn the Bulletin Board into something bigger and more relevant... but somehow it never worked out. In the end, it was just easier for him to log onto the Muck. I was never drawn into the Muck myself, for reasons I’ve already stated. Because I didn’t, Ken and I began to grow slightly apart from the day the “Trap Line” went down. It was a small crack at first, but grew larger over time. Finally, one year it was just too much trouble to organize a picnic. It was always the lot of the same people, it seemed, to get the ball rolling. When they finally said they were too busy to organize the event, no one took their place. Ken said, “maybe next year...” But there never was a next year. Another generation of furry fans was making the rules by that time. They didn’t want to run a dull, old convention. They wanted to run a camp in the woods, and named it “Feral.” With no art show or dealers room, and a whopping membership rate – currently $350 for room and board for the weekend – I never went to one. Many of the new fans seem painfully young, and they took their inspiration from animated shows that I couldn’t bring myself to watch. Japanese anime was fine by me, if you meant Hayao Miyazaki, but not Pokemon or Drag-onball Z. While I do belong to one or two of the local furry lists, I never log on and follow no discussions. The local furry fandom is today’s furry fandom. Mine was the fandom of those “Trap Line” picnics, “back when.” Maybe those days weren’t as innocent or as uncomplicated as I make them out to have been – they had conflicts and personality clashes that were no less stressful than today’s. Call it nostalgia, but I like to remember that fandom as the sunny summer days when we tried to draw on the head of a pin.

A Note From Taral - “Really, this has nothing to do with pin heads at all, except as a vague literary device at the end. This is a fond reminiscence of a kinder, gentler fandom... as it seems 20 years later. I liken it to drawing on the head of a pin because nothing could be more delicate, more beautiful in a way, and more indefensible than the things we do when we are younger.”

Remembering Anne McCaffreySteven H Silver

Although Michael Whelan is probably the artist most associated with Anne McCaffrey’s Pern series, the cover most iconic in my own mind was painted by Ron Dilg, an artist about whom I know very little, and who doesn’t have an entry in Jane Frank’s excellent reference work A Biographical Dictionary of Science Fiction and Fantasy Artists of the Twentieth Century. The reason Mr. Dilg’s artwork holds such a firm place in my memory is because he created the cover that appeared on the Science Fiction Book Club’s omnibus edition of The Drag-onriders of Pern in the late 1970s and that is the edition which introduced me to Anne McCaffrey’s world. It sits next to me as I write about Anne. I remember reading the words “Grinning like errant children, Lessa and F’lar crossed the kitchen court-yard and race up the steps to the Great Hall. The dragons on the fire-heights rose to their haunches, bugling their jubilation on this happy day while fire-lizards executed dizzy patterns in the Thread-free sky.” while curled up on my parents’ couch. I closed the book (I had already worked my way through the indices) and was disappointed, not with the story, but with the fact that I had finished reading about Anne McCaffrey’s dragons and the story had ended. Of course, I was wrong. Even by then, Dragonsong and Dragonsinger had been published and I tracked them down, reading Dragondrums when it was published. And then came Moreta: Dragonlady of Pern and Neril-

the image of Michael Whelan’s cover for Dragonflight.

ka’s Story. In those days, McCaffrey doled out dragontales slowly. In 1988, she finally gave me the book I had been wanting to read since I finished The White Dragon: Dragonsdawn told the story of the founding of Pern, answering many of the questions she had hinted at in the final chapters of her original trilogy and raising many more. In 2005, the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America had decided to hold the Nebula Awards in Chicago and I found my-self in the position of ombudsman. Officially the vice chair, it was up to me to make sure everything ran smoothly. Although the hosting group gets to choose who will serve as toastmaster and keynote speaker at the Nebulas, the choice of grandmaster is the prerogative of the sitting President. Catherine Asaro informed us that Anne Mc-Caffrey would be named Damon Knight Grandmaster. I added a note to my task list. My job now included the extremely pleasant chore of making sure everything went as smoothly as possible for Anne, her children, and grandchildren. I was in touch with Anne in the weeks before she flew to Chicago, making sure all the arrangements were made for her. When I final got to meet her, I introduced myself and she turned to her son, Todd, and asked him to bring down the item she had left on her dresser. Todd returned a few moments later with a bottle of Bailey’s Irish Cream which Anne gave me as a thank you. I’m not a drinker and when I got home at the end of the weekend, I set the bottle aside. Later that night, I presented Anne with a cake which was frosted with

Over the course of the weekend, my duties kept me quite busy. But I did hear a mundane who was stay-ing at the hotel comment “I thought I just saw Anne McCaffrey in the elevator,” which was a pretty cool moment. On one of my brief excursions from the hotel, I was walking back with Pat Sayre McCoy and we saw Anne and Todd on the other side of the street. Anne was on a motorized scooter and she and Todd began to cross at a crosswalk, not realizing that the curb was cut on the side they had started from, but not their destination. Pat and I hurried into the street to make sure traffic stayed stopped and then helped Todd lift the scooter, with Anne still on board, onto the sidewalk on the opposite side. We needed centerpieces for the table, and I spotted a couple of dragon puppets. I arranged to buy sev-eral of them and we created the centerpieces...dragons, either blue or green, resting on a cottony gauze draped over mirrors. We presented one of the dragons to Anne at the banquet and we auctioned off the rest to raise money for the SFWA Emergency Medical Fund. The centerpieces were just a small way to acknowledge the new grandmaster. The cake and the centerpieces were not even my favorite way of honoring Anne that weekend. Before the banquet, I had approached each member of Anne’s family and gave them a small can with instructions. When Anne approached the podium to receive the Grandmaster Award and give her speech, her family withdrew their cans of Silly String, pointed them high into the air, and presented Anne with her very own Threadfall. Earlier I mentioned my copy of Dragonriders of Pern sitting next to my left. To my right sits an unopened bottle of Bailey’s Irish Cream, the same bottle Anne gave me the night we met. In a few moments, my wife and I will crack the seal and toast Anne’s memory, her writing, and her grace.

I only talked to Anne once at length. It was at WorldCon in LA. She said she liked my hair. I said I liked her knitting bag. She laughed. It was a wonderful laugh. - Chris Garcia

52 Weeks to Science Fiction Film Literacy: Star Wars There is no movie that is a bigger touchstone to my generation than Star Wars. You can look at just about every filmmaker under the age of 45 and find that it was Star Wars that made them into the people they are to-day. Star Wars changed movies. Star Wars changed fandom, and whether or not it was for the better is a matter of debate. Star Wars, in many ways, defines what science fiction film has become and introduced a new kind of movie to the world. Star Wars represents the beginning and the end of several lines of cinematic evolution. I’ve got a lot of feelings about Star Wars, and the first film, the one that came out in 1977, is called Star Wars, not A New Hope. It was released as Star Wars and it will always be so! Like I was saying, I have a lot of feelings about Star Wars, but not nearly as many thoughts. It was a film that came out when my thoughts towards film were nothing but feelings, and it was a film that was really more about what it made you feel than what it made you think. This was a turning point for that kind of film. It had always existed, looking back you can see that the initial films were all about that. The Actualities of the 1890s and early 1900s, the trick films (Princess Nicotine being my favorite) were certainly the kind of films that weren’t about telling a story. Early animations, many avant garde and experimental films fall in there, but this was the real mo-ment when it crossed into the mainstream, became the concept. The Blockbuster is based on feeling something, on giving in and just going with the flow of the film, with the massiveness of the effects, the wonder of it all. In a way, it was a return to the Lloyd and Keaton and Fairbanks and Valentino era of film with the wonder carrying the banner. Star Wars is Fantasy. There is a mysterious force in the Universe that flows through everything. It allows those who are clos-est in-touch with it to call upon its power as well as providing assistance. THAT’S ALL! There is no bacteria that produces it or allows people to tap into it. No metachlorians! It’s Magic, dammit! And that is a good thing and an important thing and a beautiful thing. For much of the 1950s an d60s, Science Fiction was dominated by the vision of one man: John W. Camp-bell. His vision of science fiction bled out of the mags into movies, into films. Even the ones that were reacting against Campbellian SF were incredibly informed by it. The big SF films typically tackled topics (Communism, Consumerism, Corporateism, etc) or they were mindless films of monsters in suits, which in their own ways were reactions to the advances in science all around us. Star Wars was a fantasy, it wasn’t talking about the danger of giving ourselves over to a dark and sinister master, it wasn’t going on and on about the troubles of Imperialism, or the fight for freedoms. It was about a kid who wanted more and found out that he was much, much more! It was the dream of every kid to find out that they are a Galactic Saviour with Powers beyond their comprehension. The Princess Diaries lied about that. It was that sort of wish-fulfillment that led every young male to see Star Wars multiple times. It was able to pass over being just another Science Fiction film into being something important and magical. And that is an important thing, because if you are stuck in a mode that requires heavy thought, and really,

to really get the SF of the 1960s and especially 1970s, you had to have an eye out for what was going on around you, at least a little. With Star Wars, it tapped into the central desire of every kid in the world. It was adventure and joy and magic on the grandest scale. Star Wars is Science Fiction. There’s no question there, right? It’s a classic! There are spaceships! Them’s robots they got there! It’s interplanetary war and rebellion! It’s E.E. Smith stuff , with just a dash of Asimov and Bester, maybe a touch of Brackett. The influence of the Western is solidly in there, too. A posse is formed to save the kidnapped girl. Then again, you could look at it as a Saving the Fair Princess fantasy story, too. It’s got the old sage whose best days are behind him. How many Westerns feature that character? Then again, I can think of a dozen Fantasy stories that have that one. And science fiction novels. And films. And Detective novels. And on and on. One funny thing is a book I reviewed last year, The Half-Made World by Felix Gilman, which tells a very very similar story and I never realised it until I started looking at Star Wars. It’s a story of a group that has con-quered most of the world (The Line) which is the Empire, a science-based group that is winnign through tech-nology. The Gun is a demon-based group, the fantasy, and they are warring with the Line and losing. It has a lot of different elements, but in the end, it is a Magic-embued group feuding with a Technology-fueled machine. They even have a Death Star analogue! It hit me rather hard! And maybe that’s what Star Wars is ultimately responsible for – blurring the lines. Fantasy and science fic-tion have often had soft edges, but here it’s an over-lapping slough of fantasy and science fiction. You can see that

same feeling in so many other films since Star Wars came out. A lot of them being Star Wars rip-offs, but what are you go-ing to do. Let’s look at the cast. The first, and single most important character is Luke Skywalker, played by Mr. Mark Hamill. The role of the young man who is chomping at the bit to get off the rock on which he considers the furthest point from the bright center of the Universe, It’s a character that has the ultimate motivation: he knows he’s nothing special, but he desperately wants to become something, anything. In the 1940s, he would have been Roddy McDowell. Watch his work in How Green Was My Valley (the film that beat Citizen Kane for Best Picture, and deservedly I might add) and look for the simple things he does that tells a similar story. In the 1950s, it would have been James Dean, that vulnerability would have played per-fectly. In the 60s, you could have cast any number of young go-getters, but I would have wanted to see it tackled by one of my all-time faves: Henry Fonda. Luke is, ultimately, annoying.

He whines through so much of it, then goes into a thing that is best described as the puppy. He follows Obi-Wan like a puppy and studies his Force things. He adventures, diving into it with great gusto, which is easy to under-stand because he’s been trying to get out and now he has his way! After that, he’s the hero using the Force and stuff. Go figure. Hamill was impressive in that he knew how to play all the emotions against each other. He wasn’t an experienced actor, but he ended up becoming one on the set. Next is Princess Leia. She has to be several things to the film. She is the tough, duty-bound member of the cast that has to provide almost the entire connection to anything bigger than the problems of a kid who is tired of his own planet. She has to be tough, she has to be angry, and most important of all, she has to have the feeling that she doesn’t need to be saved, she’s just gotta get out of her current situation. She doesn’t need saving, but she needs to get out of the ties that have held her down in the situation. It’s a hard role to play. In the 1930s, it’d be someone like Thelma Todd, which may seem odd to those who know her work, es-pecially the stuff with Zazu Pitts, but watch the interaction between Leia and Vader and Tarkin and you’ll see the threads. Liz Taylor for the late 1940’s and early 50s, perhaps. For the late 50s, it’s easy to say that Natalie Wood would be perfect, and I think she would have provided everything that you could have wanted. In the 1960s, you would have had to have cast Faye Dunaway. There would have been no other choice! Two things that are interesting is that she has little interaction with many of the others. There’s a good bit with Luke, including the kiss that would go on to feel very oogy (and it does speak to my idea that Lucas changed everything after the success of Star Wars), and there’s the start of the stuff with Han that would come to the front in the Empire and Jedi. She’s an amazingly strong character, but there are stumbling blocks. Replace her with a man and the story is the same as far as Star Wars is concerned. It isn’t until Empire that her beign a female becomes an important part of the story, especially with her relationship with Han. Oh yes, Han Solo. There is a lot of thought about Han’s character arc that Lucas ruined with his foolish re-editing in the 1990s. Han starts out as a character who is out for only himself, and at the end, he’s a guy who is a fighter for the rebellion and cares about those around as much as himself. It’s a transformation that is complete in Star Wars itself. Another reason to think that Star Wars was supposed to be a stand-alone film. In the 30s, Clark Gable. In the 40s, Humphrey Bogart. In the 60s, Dennis Hopper or Warren Beaty. The key is being able to play the turn. It’s never easy to play a turn, but at the same time, you have to have the performance feel like it’s being done by a movie star. And this is a movie star’s role. You don’t have to be a great actor, but you have to have some chops. The key here is a combination of charisma, performance and swagger. Always the swagger. He shoots Greedo, the bounty hunter that Jabba the Hutt has sent to collect his money. Greedo is sup-posed to be the one doing the shooting, but Han gets the drop on him by using the conversation they have as a distraction so that he can be the one doing the shooting. He lives and does the mission that Obi-Wan pays him for, and then he is paid by Leia & Co. and goes off to pay Jabba, but returns to save Luke’s bacon in the attack on the Death Star. It’s brilliant, and a great actor could have gotten part of it, but only a Movie Star could make it shine. The relationship between Han and Chewbacca is an important one, especially in the area of status in the film. Chewie isn’t a real turning point in the story. He’s merely a convenient tool. He makes no decisions, but he does allow for things to happen. When they are on the Death Star, he is “captured” and taken into the detention level and that allows the real fun to begin. Chewbacca isn’t the kind of character who makes any difference in the flow of the story, but also provides a lot of color to it. OK, I’ve held off long enough. Obi Wan Kenobi, played by the master of all actors: Alec Guiness. His work here is great, he was nominated for Best Supporting Actor, but for some reason he didn’t win. He had the easiest role (it’s not that hard to play the role of the master in the Master/Student storyline) and the hardest (he had to get the idea of the Force across and was the one we were supposed to be imprinted on by) and that makes it impressive that he managed. I can’t think of who possibly would have been able to play the role in the 30s or 40s, but in the 50s I would have loved to have seen Walter Huston playing him. In the 60s: Olivier, or maybe Da-vid Niven. The best part of Guinness’ performance is that he makes it all feel like there’s so much more. You can feel it, you understand what he is saying, but most importantly, you feel for him and with him. For me, the loss of

Obi Wan is the most painful thing ever. I’ve watched Star Wars hundreds of times, and every time I see Obi Wan slashed by Vader, I feel a great loss. It’s incredible. Oh yeah, Vader. Darth Vader is the heavy, the biggest villain in the Universe. He is dark. He is evil. He fights a fight that is incredibly heavy. In Star Wars, Vader is the end-all/be-all of Bad Guys. He is the end of the line. He is looming over Grand Mof Wilhoff Tarken. He is the bad guy and we can see that he is awful. Everything about Vader is designed to scream that he is the heavy. And basically, he’s an uncuddly Obi Wan. He is the only one who believes in the Force other than Obi Wan, easily the most powerful character in the film other than Obi Wan, who becomes more powerful when he allows himself to be over-powered by Vader. Vader is a great character, and instead of killing him off cleanly, they have his X-wing damaged and fly off into the nowhere. What’s funny is that spiraling off like that would make him far more likely to be dead than just about anything. This is the only part that really hints at there being a future episode in the Saga, which is the only real evidence that this wasn’t going to be a stand-alone. And there’s another point: Star Wars is the only one that works as a stand-alone film. The ending, the awarding of the medals by Leia and the celebration, is a REAL ending. When Return of the Jedi ended with the Ewoks playing the skulls (and since that’s how it was when first released, that’s how is WAS without question!) that was a real ending, and very powerful, but not nearly as powerful as the ending of Star Wars. I actually think that Jedi is a much better movie than people give it credit for. Star Wars is a complete film, a total event. There is a start, a middle and a finish. A beautiful finish. It’s complete. While I understand that people love Empire, a film I’m not particularly fond of (at least in comparison to either of the other films), it’s not a better film than Star Wars. The effect of Star Wars can be seen in hundreds of places. The biggest one is the world of promotions and premiums and tie-ins that grew up around films in the years following Star Wars. Lucas’ real genius was to hold on to International marketing rights and the ability to make his own deals. Star Wars action figures became massively hot sellers, making Lucas bank. Films had done tie-ins before, but it was with Star Wars that introduced the fast food tie-in with Burger King’s collector glasses. These led to huge increases in sales for Burger King and later, the introduction of the combo that included a glass was a huge advancement. The marketing blitzes of the

1950s and 60s were huge, massive single events that were covered by television and radio, huge magazine spreads and appearances, and that stuck around, but everything got bigger. It wasn’t just the entertainment sector that was involved, it was in the mainstream, fast food places, department stores, toy stores, etc. It changed film at the core. How it changed films is even more intense. The effects picture evolved out of the trick films, taking that side-trip through experimental film, and the effects picture went huge following Star Wars. In Star Wars, there were huge numbers of effects, more so than in any other picture up to that time. Even King King, which had the most effects of its day, had less than half of the effects that Star Wars employed. There were so many new and novel effects that people had never seen. Computer effects had been in films like Westworld, but nothing like the Death Star briefing had ever been seen. Seamless integration of computer animation and the real world. It was impressive, and I can remember being awed by it. The composite stuff wasn’t perfect, especially when you look at it today, but at the time, it was cutting edge stuff. What gets over-looked so often is the art direction. There were a half-dozen major environmental set-tings. Tattooine, a desert environment, where the vehicle they designed (and I’ve seen a couple of the models and they are AMAZING) were perfect for the environment. You had the Death Star, perfectly sterile and industrial. This is the vision of the future that existed in so many other films, and is really the science fiction portion of the film. There’s the Millennium Falcon, a space ship that feels like a long-haul trucker’s cabin. There’s the Rebel base, where the briefing happens, and it feels light and airy and open. It’s the complete opposite of the Death Star. The asteroid where they encounter the giant space worm, is the ultimate in double-dip wonder: the interior of the worm and the exterior of the asteroid. Amazing work. I should talk about the other films. SO many people say that Empire is the best of the series. I don’t see it, but the art di-rection, the improved effects, the introduc-tion of Lando and of Boba Fett all add to it. Between the Hoth setting and Vespin, the Cloud City, and Dagobah, you’ve got an set designer’s dream picture. It’s amazing what they did there, though the story fails to hold me. Return of the Jedi was a more complete story, it had a real and lasting ending, but it wasn’t as good a story as Jedi. I’ll admit it, I love the Ewoks. I don’t get why people hate them so. Here, the territory covered is a forest, a new Death Star, Degobah, a couple of neat moments here and there, but the battle of Endor was freakin’ awesome! I still think that was my favorite battle in all the Star Wars films. The effects overall were the best of all three of the films and I thought that the way the Emperor was used was pretty awesome. And then there were the first three. I am in the minority who thought that the first one of the new set, The Phantom Menace, was pretty good. Visually stunning, the story didn’t matter at all, which is par for the course for Post-Star Wars Blockbusters. Liam Neeson was really good, there were some very exciting fight scenes, but the real highlight was the Pod-Racing scene, taken straight out of Ben Hur . The real problem: JarJar Binx. Yes, the rastafied bastard ruined Phantom Menace for me like the Ewoks did for folks who were my age when Jedi came out. There was also a lot of stuff that looked like the broadly done racial stuff fro 1930s movies, which might have been Lucas’ idea going in. The second film pretty much sucked, save for the hottest of Natalie Portman. She was at her most gorgeous in that one. The almost exclusive use of Greenscreen shooting was another problem. Attack of the Clones lacked heart in almost every dimension. The cinematography was almost non-existent and the acting was stiff. Revenge of the Sith was bad, but cool-looking. I kept hoping for Lucas to do something to mess with what Star Wars fan had

always known (like he could have killed off Obi-Wan for example) but alas, he had not the balls for that one. I haven’t talked about the robots. You could argue that they are the most important characters as they are the only ones who are alive through all of the six films. Well, not alive, but you take my meaning. They are probably the most important robots in western history, though neither of them were real robots. I have actually worked with an actual, movie-used R2D2 while at the Computer Museum in Boston. It was my job to clean him once a month. I loved that part of the gig! Those two robots were significant in that they became the symbol of a robotics dichotomy: you were either a non-human vacuum cleaner or a humanoid. C3PO is the total package: he walks, he talks, he makes sarcastic remarks and he sells himself up for potential buyers. It’s a nice piece of anthropomorphization for the guy. R2D2 is a cylinder. He talks in beeps and bloops. He moves on wheels. He is almost the exact opposite of all that C3PO is. It’s also part of why he’s the move loved of the two of them. His complete lack of humanity makes it possible for us to project ourselves onto him. And it feels strange calling him a him, though it’s how C3PO always referred to him. There is no use for gender to be applied to R2. He’s just R2, and that has made him the best-loved robot ever. He was one of the first entrants into CMU’s Robot Hall of Fame (C3PO entered the Hall in the second batch). There is so much to talk about when it comes to people running with Star Wars for comedy. Hardware Wars was easily the best of the parodies until the Family Guy and Robot Chicken take-offs. There were many many others, and a few about the phenomena of Star Wars effects on fans. Fanboys, one of the funnier films of 2009, was all about the Star Wars fandom and the lengths they will go to. It’s a fun little movie. I haven’t even touched on the music yet. John Williams is a pretty amazing guy. He’s written some of the best film music that’s ever been. In Star Wars, he perfectly captures mood, especially in the Force theme, which is the music playing over Luke as he watched the Binary Sunset. It’s a powerful piece of music and it so perfectly captures the moment. The Cantina Band music, two pieces written by Williams, are both amazingly evocative of what a fun-and-free cantina should be. There’s no better piece of music that captures a location that that. It’s re-ally effective scoring. Warren Buff has a piece that he’ll write someday about Star Wars as a Wagnerian Opera. I know, I can’t wait either! How long do I go on? I could talk about how Star Wars spawned years of serious imitators, leading ot terrible films like Star Crash, Zardoz (OK, I’ve got a soft-spot for Zardoz) and Galaxina. I could talk about how Lucus seems to have blown every other filmmaking opportunity he’s ever had. I could talk about the influence of Pulp SF on Lucas, of the way that the Star Wars films drove innovation not only in filmmaking but in video games, too. There are so many many things you can talk about with Star Wars, but in the end, it all comes down to emo-tion. That’s what Star Wars is about, and for my generation, it is the basis for all our attachment to the emo-tions drawn from media. It started what we feel for films, television. There is a big difference between the worlds that Star Wars and Star Trek fans inhabit, which are both far removed from the world of the general SF fandom. Star Wars fan revel in the worlds that were created in a far more visual form than Trek fandom, it being much more centered around costumes. There were a great number of Trek fanzines, for example, of HIGHLY variable

quality (kinda like the Drink Tank...) while Star Wars zines existed, they were not nearly in the number of Trek zines. There have been hard core Star Wars costuming groups since about 1979. Trek fandom invented Slash (OK, that’s not true, but they certainly did make it a much bigger thing) and Star Wars pretty much made the Fan Film a HUGE deal, first in the late 70s and early 80s (Hardware Wars being the most famous, though there were enough that I remember a Star Wars Fan Film Festival as early as 1984) and getting more and more advanced as time went by, to the point that Lucas ended up coming up with awards that were given out annually. Troops (a spoof on Cops) and George Lucas in Love made big splashes. There were Trek fan films (and many Dr. Who as well, including more than one by Kevin Standlee) but no other fandom brought as much love of making their own films as Star Wars fandom. And they invaded mainstream fandom as well. Folks from the Star Wars cast showed up at Mid-Americon, the 1976 WorldCon, which turned out to be an important WorldCon when you consider everything that happened there. I seem to remember that there was a display of some sort at the 1984 WorldCon, but maybe I’m wrong. There certainly were a bunch of folks in Stor-mtrooper outfits. I remember that. The influx of Star Wars (and Star Trek fans, let’s be honest) in the late 70s and early 80s saw SF fandom swell to its largest size ever, and we’ve been sliding backwards for the last two decades. A separate Star Wars fandom grew up and it is probably larger than SF fandom in numbers. They have cons that bring in tens of thousands, a number we’ve only flirted with in WorldCons once, and the cons that are that size are very different animals (ie. Dragon*Con). Star Wars and much of Trek fandom peeled away from us and their numbers have grown while ours have stagnated/slightly shrunk/ever-so-slightly grown, it depends on your view of what makes someone a member of fandom. Star Wars. Yes, big deal of a movie, HUGE deal of a cultural phenomena, and one of the few films that can be said to have changed the course of film entirely. You’ll also notice that it’s almost at the exact center of the 52 Weeks series because in all honesty, you can separate SF Film into two time periods: Before Star Wars, and after. After Star Wars, the Deluge!