Steam Engine Time 06.pdf

Steam Engine T ime

ERIC RAYMOND DEBATE

HEINLEIN’S ‘STAR BEAST’

REVISIONIST VIEW

of LE GUIN

Zoran Bekric

Ditmar (Dick Jenssen)

E. B. Frohvet

Bruce Gillespie

David J. Lake

Yvonne Rousseau

David Russell

Jan Stinson

and many others

Issue 6 August 2007

Steam Engine T ime 6

STEAM ENGINE TIME No. 6, August 2007

is edited and published by Bruce Gillespie, 5 Howard Street, Greensborough VIC 3088, Australia (gandc@mira.net)

and Janine Stinson, PO Box 248, Eastlake, MI 49626-0248, USA (tropicsf@earthlink.net). Members fwa.

First edition is in .PDF file format from http://efanzines.com, or enquire from either of our email addresses.

Print edition available for:

Subscriptions (Australia: $40, cheques to ‘Gillespie & Cochrane Pty Ltd’; Overseas: $US50 or £20, or equivalent, air-

mail; please send folding money, not cheques); Traded fanzines (printed); Review copies; Contributors; or whim.

Printed by Copy Place, Basement, 415 Bourke Street, Melbourne VIC 3000.

Illustrations

Ditmar (Dick Jenssen): front cover, and pp. 7, 8; David Russell: back cover, and pp. 21, 29.

Photographs

Covers of various books and magazines discussed in this issue; plus photos by Philip Harbottle (p. 3); Jenny Blackford

(p. 9); Yvonne Rousseau (pp. 10, 12, 15, 17); Eric Lindsay (p. 11); Jason Von Hollander (p. 27); John Baxter (p. 34).

A big thank you

The print edition of Steam Engine Time 5 was made possible by a very generous donation by Dr David J. Lake, Brisbane.

3 EDITORIAL 1:

Farewell to Syd – and changes here at SET

Bruce Gillespie

27 LETTERS OF COMMENT

Darrell Schweitzer

Damien Broderick

Harry Buerkett

Chris Garcia

Alan Sandercock

Jeff Hamill

Greg Egan

Martin Morse Wooster

James Doig

Julian Warner

Art Widner

Sara Creasy

Terence M. Green

Dora Levakis

E. D. Webber

Stephen Campbell

Jerry Kaufman

Ian Nichols

John Baxter

Lee Harding

Steve Sneyd

Robert Elordieta

Robert Sabella

Larry Bigman

E. B. Frohvet

Patrick McGuire

Steve Jeffrey

Joseph Nicholas

Lloyd Penney

Gary Dalkin

Franz Rottensteiner

Tony Keen

and many others

5 EDITORIAL 2:

Afloat on a sea of books

Jan Stinson

THIS ISSUE’S COVER

7 When will the men return?

or, Non-standard spaces

Ditmar (Dick Jenssen)

ERIC RAYMOND DEBATE

9 Critical Mass versus Eric Raymond

Yvonne Rousseau

plus the members of Adelaide’s Critical Mass:

Zoran Bekric, Ian Borchardt, Neil Cooper,

Brian Edwards, Jacq Felis, Jeff Harris,

Adam Jenkins, Roman Orszanski

14 Notes on Yvonne Rousseau’s article

Zoran Bekric

15 Why libertarian politics don’t have much to do with SF

Zoran Bekric

HEINLEIN JUVENILES

19 Jurisprudential difficulties in Heinlein’s The Star Beast

E. B. Frohvet

REVISIONIST NOTES ON LE GUIN

22 Grouches on Gethen:

Improbabilities in The Left Hand of Darkness

David Lake

25 Coda: Estraven’s early life

David Lake

GILLESPIE FANZINES GO ELECTRONIC

Because I cannot afford to continue supporting the cost of printing and posting my magazines from my irregular income,

I am changing the distribution pattern from now on.

STEAM ENGINE TIME

I will honour all subscriptions paid for paper copies; regular trades for magazines sent by post; regular suppliers of

books for review; plus a print copy for each contributor.

All other readers are pointed towards the ‘Bruce Gillespie’ section of http://efanzines.com, where you will find each

issue in .PDF format as it appears. If you let me know by email on gandc@mira.net, you become an official Downloader.

I will email you when each future issue is published.

SF COMMENTARY

THE METAPHYSICAL REVIEW

The only hope I have of reviving these magazines is to make them available only on efanzines.com. Watch that space.

Editorial by Bruce Gillespie

Farewell to Syd —

and changes here at SET

Late last year I received the following

email, which passed on a message

from British agent, writer and fan Phil

Harbottle : ‘It is with profound sorrow

that I announce the death of Sydney J.

Bounds . Syd died peacefully in his

sleep this morning, Saturday 24

November 2006, after just one night in

a hospice, after leaving hospital.’ Syd

Bounds had just turned 86. He died of

cancer.

Few readers or writers in Australia

will have read Syd Bounds’ many

stories or novels. They appeared

mainly in Nebula and New Worlds , the

best-known English SF magazines of

the 1950s and 1960s, or from smaller

British publishers, such as Robert

Hale, rarely distributed here. I’ve only

ever found one of his books in a

secondhand store. Readers of my

magazines, especially SF Commentary ,

will have noticed that Syd Bounds

wrote a letter of comment to almost

every issue that he received. Because I

did not receive a letter in reply to Steam

Engine Time 5, I knew something was

very wrong with him. A year earlier he

had written to me that his landlord in

Kingston-on-Thames, South London,

was trying to throw out him and his

collection. A few months later, Ansible

reported that Syd had moved to an

address in the country, presumably a

nursing home. I sent SET 5 there, but

he was probably already too ill to reply

to it.

Why notice the death of Syd

Bounds when the year has been filled

with news of the deaths of notable

figures in SF and fandom, especially

Arthur Wilson (Bob) Tucker , one of

my favourite SF writers, and the

mightiest fan of us all (subject of two

different issues of SF Commentary ), Lee

Hoffman , the first and greatest female

fanzine editor ( Quandry , Science Fiction

Five Yearly ), rich brown , long-time fan-

nish fan, Dick Eney , publisher of the

Fancyclopedia , and Jack Williamson ,

whose publishing career extended

from the late 1920s until now? (More

than any other novel, his The Human-

oids , read when I was twelve, made me

a lifetime SF reader.)

I’m paying special attention to Syd

Bounds because of his wonderful

quality of self-effacement (the rarest

quality among writers) and the great

kindness he offered me when I visited

England in January 1974. Syd actually

let me sleep upstairs in his bed in his

tiny house in Kingston for a week

while he slept on the settee downstairs.

He also provided directions for mak-

ing my way to central London during

Sydney J. Bounds, 1920–2006.

(Photo: courtesy Philip Harbottle, Cosmos

Literary Agency.)

a week of tube-system strikes. After

surviving my visit, he was kind

enough to keep in touch, often exhort-

ing me to take up fiction writing (hah!),

and sending a constant stream of news

about the 1950s–60s British writers

(such as Ted Tubb and Ken Bulmer)

who were still alive.

The death of Syd Bounds has a sym-

bolic importance. He never bought a

computer. He kept himself solvent by

writing everything on a portable type-

writer. As I said in an email when he

died: ‘I keep saying that I publish

paper copies of my fanzines for people

like Syd Bounds who are not on the

net. With Syd gone, the temptation to

rely purely on the internet for distribu-

tion becomes a lot stronger.’

Dave Langford , editor and writer

of the monthly newszine Ansible ,

replied: ‘Syd was one of the reasons to

keep producing the paper Ansible .

There are still a few others, but very

few. It’s a wrench each time an old,

familiar name has to be removed (e.g.

Ken Bulmer ).’

The death of Syd Bounds gives

strength to my arm in changing the

distribution of my magazines so that I

can afford to keep publishing them.

Readers don’t take me seriously when

I say that my real income has been

dropping steadily since the mid 1990s.

In 2006–07 I earned about a quarter as

much, in real terms, as I did in 1979–80.

That year was the last time I published

SF Commentary monthly, ending in

Number 62/63/64/65/66, which was

the last for eight years. (I didn’t earn

much in the early eighties.)

I feel that most readers can now

download SET , SF Commentary , and

even a long-promised revival of The

Metaphysical Review , from PDF files on

http://efanzines.com . Quite a few

readers have paid subscriptions to

ensure receiving paper copies of these

magazines. I will honour SET sub-

scriptions, but I plan to revive SFC and

TMR as internet-only magazines. This

will free me from the enormous eco-

nomic weight I feel each time I think

about publishing a magazine. It costs

at least $450 (printing and postage) to

publish a 20-pager and $900 to publish

a 44-pager. I no longer have that kind

of spare cash.

fanzine, Cosmic Cuts . After the war

he worked in a factory, and since he

loathed the job, he began working

more seriously as a fiction writer in

hopes of making a living that way.

In the ’40s he started writing hard-

boiled crime novels and selling

‘spicy’ stories to the pulps, and he

remained a working writer for the

rest of his life, producing fiction un-

der at least 24 personal pseudo-

nyms.

juvenile fiction.

In fact, when it comes to fingers

in pies, Bounds only seriously loses

out in the not-enough-pies for his

multi-talented fingers part of the

equation. ‘People think writing is

not work. But it’s bloody hard work

if you’re doing it full-time. I used to

wonder why am I sweating blood

to get a few pounds, when I could

walk into a factory job and have it

easy? But of course, it’s more inter-

esting. Even though very few

people make real money out of it.’

So which, among his diverse spread

of styles, is the most important

priority now? SF? ‘Well, it was

when I started,’ he chortles. ‘Now,

my main interest is surviving until

the undertaker calls . . . !’

Writing is a solitary vocation.

How does he deal with that? ‘You

get used to that, as a writer. Since

my mother died I’ve always been

on my own. It doesn’t worry me.’

Now, ‘I’ve finished number seven

in the “Savage” series of Robert

Hale westerns, for the libraries. I’m

just trying to work out some kind of

outline for number eight. But it’s

hard going. . . . The books go direct

into the libraries. They don’t pay

much, but the point is you get

something out of PLR (public lend-

ing right). Plus there’s a chance

they’ll be taken up by large-print

editions. I think there’s three of my

westerns that have gone into large-

print so far, and [my agent] Phil

Harbottle has started re-selling

some of my old 1950s’ crime books

to large-print. They, of course, go

into the library too, and then you

get more PLR. Over a period it adds

up. It’s a useful pension these days.

And people are reading them, be-

cause when the PLR comes through

they provide a list of how many

times it’s been out, at 2.4 p each time

anyone takes one out of the library.

Which adds up.

Among those who paid him tribute

was his agent and friend Phil Har-

bottle :

I spoke to Syd to thank him for all

his friendship and literary support

over nearly 40 years (he has been a

cornerstone of my career as an edi-

tor/writer/agent) and told him of

all the forthcoming books, and that

he would be remembered etc., etc.,

fearing it might be a last conversa-

tion. Syd’s voice was amazingly

clear, his memory of the past events

I touched on, sharp. I spoke to Mike

at the end of the call and com-

mented on how well Syd sounded.

He said that Syd had ‘rallied for the

call’. Syd himself spoke of getting

back home and hoped I could rear-

range my trip to see him after Xmas.

I’ve just sold his last western novel,

Savage Rides West , to Robert Hale,

who asked Syd to expand his last

page a little. I said I’d agree this

with Syd and insert it as a proof

correction. Syd assured me he

would be doing this when he got

home!

Long-time British fan Andrew Dar-

lington , in an interview (in

zone.sf_com ) with Syd conducted

before he contracted cancer:

I still haven’t said nearly enough about

Syd Bounds. Truth to tell, I knew little

about his life and career until he died.

Locus paid him a fine tribute in the

January 2007 issue:

He considers that, ‘unlike the

young writers at the World Fantasy

Convention who specialised, who

wrote fantasy only and were like

gods in this one tiny field’, to him

weird tales are only one aspect of a

diverse lifetime’s fictional output.

He also writes for that most

neglected of genres — the western

— with some twenty prairie-

pounding titles currently in print,

as well as crime (including contri-

butions to the long-running ‘Sexton

Blake’ series), ‘spicy’ magazine sto-

ries, horror and fantasy. Then

there’s a profitable parallel line in

Born November 4, 1920 in Brighton,

Sussex, Bounds became hooked on

SF when he read a Jack Williamson

story in a 1936 issue of Astounding .

He joined the Science Fiction Asso-

ciation in 1937, meeting Arthur C.

Clarke and other fans. During

WWII he served as a corporal in the

RAF, and worked as an electrician

on the Enigma machine. While in

the service he co-founded SF fan

group the Cosmos Club, and pub-

lished his first stories in their

Imagine living like that, year after

y ea r, o n b it s a nd p ie c es f ro m w o rk so l d

to the lowest-paying markets in

Britain, returning to odd jobs when

absolutely necessary, yet always opti-

mistic, always working, always plan-

ning the next project? No wonder I

never tried writing as way of earning

a living; no wonder I’m honouring the

memory of Syd Bounds.

Editorial by Jan Stinson

Afloat on a sea of books

A flood of books has been arriving at

my house since last autumn, and what

with illness and other life events get-

ting in the way, I’ve gotten rather

behind on writing about them all. This

column, which may become a regular

feature of SET , is one way to deal with

the deluge.

whom they go. Gods ands deceivers

are also on the loose, and the four lead

characters are each affected to differ-

ent degrees by all this unearthly busi-

ness. Readers who like Charles de Lint

will eat this book up. I’m one, and I

certainly did. Highly recommended.

periods I don’t like. Highly recom-

mended.

The Collected Short Fiction

of C. J. Cherryh

(DAW, New York: 2004; 640 pp.,

hb; ISBN 0-7564-0217- 4)

C. J. Cherryh is best known for her

novels, but she’s written a fair amount

of short fiction (one of her stories, ‘Cas-

sandra’, got her her first Hugo). This

tome contains all the contents of Sun-

fall (a collection of short works on what

major Earth cities like London and

Paris might look like in a far future),

Visible Light (various short fiction), and

a bunch of other stories from various

anthologies (and the NESFA Press

book Glass and Amber , now out of print,

as well as one of the Darkover Grand

Council program books). Intensity of

viewpoint has been her forte for nearly

all of her writing career. While it’s on

display to its greatest range in her

novels, it’s also in her short fiction, and

is the linchpin of everything she writes

in this collection. It’s well worth hav-

ing (and studying, for writers). She’s

written an introduction for this as well,

and for those who have trouble wait-

ing for new CJC verbiage between

novel publications, this is a welcome

distraction. Highly recommended.

Dark of the Sun

by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro (Tor, New

York: 2004. 460 pp., hb. ISBN

0-765-31102-X)

I Am Alive and You Are Dead:

A Journey into the Mind of Philip K.

Dick

by Emmanuel Carrère (Translation

from the French edition. 1993)

(Picador, New York: 2004. 315

pp., tpb. ISBN 0-312-42451-5)

Philip K. Dick has had a lot of his books

made into movies, some good, some

not so good (it’s mostly a matter of

taste). But Emmanuel Carrère has writ-

ten a sort of biography about PKD that

uses a very interesting method: he

writes in a third-person intensive,

which allows him to get inside PKD’s

mind, as it were, and live his life

through the writer’s eyes. It’s an amaz-

ing trick to try, and Carrère pulls it off

brilliantly. I’ve not read many of

PKD’s novels (I can’t remember even

reading one, in truth), but this book

made me want to go out and read all

of them. I am not that easily led,

people. This is a great read, even if you

don’t care for PKD’s fiction. Highly

recommended.

States of Grace

by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro (Tor, New

York: 2005. 332 pp., hb, ISBN

0-765-31390-1

Dark of the Sun and States of Grace are

the two ‘Count Saint Germain’ novels

most recently in print. For those few

who may not be familiar with Yarbro’s

most famous character, Francisco

Ragoczy de Saint Germain is a vampire

who’s been alive since before the fall of

the Roman Empire. Yarbro uses him as

a method of exploring both what it

might be like to live for centuries and

not have one’s most vital secret

revealed, and the day-to-day lives of

people in the merchant and upper

classes in various time periods. Dark of

the Sun is set during the sixth century

CE, and uses the effects of Krakatoa’s

volcanic explosion to examine the

power of superstition and the life of a

trader. States of Grace takes the reader

back to the Reformation era in Venice,

Italy and in the Spanish Netherlands,

where Saint Germain establishes a

publishing house that becomes the

target of the Spanish Inquisition.

I was put off from the Saint Ger-

main novels many years ago, when I

tried to read one set in Victorian Eng-

land. I did not read another until Dark

of the Sun , and was more than happy to

move on to States of Grace after finish-

ing the former. Both are excellent. It

helps that the historical periods in-

volved are of interest to me, and I sus-

pect that’s true for any reader. But the

characters seemed more fully drawn

here, and St. Germain’s droll zombie

assistant provided piquant humor

when needed. I’d certainly search out

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