K19


K19, an APAzine for Pieces of Eight, Nov. '91, from A. Vincent Clarke, 16 Wendover Way, Welling, Kent, DA16 2BN."The two most difficult problems which the habitual writer has to cope with are book reviewers and spouses" Brian Stableford – The Way To Write Science Fiction"


UPDATE

Been very very busy during the last month, but not a lot to show for it. Part of the reason was due to the fact that I realised – again – that you can't neglect a garden for months without something happening. Which in my case was being confronted with yards of waist-high brambles.

So I was out slashing about with a scythe and cutting with shears. And I have a cunning plan – a big burn-up scheduled, even tho' I'm in a smoke free zone. 'Cos it's planned for November 5th. – the one night of the year when you can burn regardless.

I've also been working on the '70s fanzine index, which with the help of various fans is approaching the end – or at least, the end of the first edition. Here's a tiny bit imported from the Index discs:

Jabberwocky: Jean Frost
1 Mar/77 m A4 10
2 Jan/78 m A4 26

Jackie!: Chris Priest & others
(-) ?/79 L A5 20
(See also Lichtenberg Letters)

Joy: Joan Sharpe
1 Apl/73 m Q 20 d/w OMPA 69
2 Jul/73 m Q 28 d/w OMPA 70

Just Passing Through: Bryn Fortey
(-) ?/78 ? ? ?

Just Some Old Fashioned Poetry: Bryn Fortey
(-) Sum/79 x F 14

etc. etc. etc. A major headache is not so much collecting titles but determining which shall go in, the borders of what one can call a sf fanzine being very very vague. In the end the Editor's decision is final.

REVIEW

PACIFIC EDGE – Kim Stanley Robinson (Unwin Hyman '90)

This looks like a whole new genre to me – a kind of soft sf mixed with a Mills 'n' Boon romance, tho' to be different the author gives it a down-beat ending. The book is aimed with deadly precision at Californian students – long lyrical descriptions of the southern California environment which don't mean much to the outsider, a vaguely hippie atmosphere where the locals are happy playing softball, flying small gliders (as opposed to surfing), cycling, having sex and working in a vaguely socialistic setting...a student's dream.

Other parts of the world appear to be progressive – the TV show of the first landing on Mars is slotted into the story – but in this community the chief concern is the local water level and how control of it is manipulated by politicians.

An interesting experiment in focussing on a small environment and letting the rest of humanity go by, different from the usual sf where one has the trials of the hero affecting the fate of worlds...don't remember the Gray Lensman being troubled by the level of water tables.

COMMENTS ON OCT. '91 MAILING

THROUGH THE LOUD HAILER – John D. Rickett

Wow and similar exclamations of delighted wonder. If you must use loads of splendiferous equipment, this is the way to do it. Congratulations on your mastery of the stuff – what a pity young Chuck Connor isn't still in the APA; possibly you could send him a copy?

Some of the spellchecker stuff seems almost to good to be true – you wouldn't be trying to kid us, Cap'n? I guess Maureen or Ian will come up with the 36K Amstrad version (Ian Baby, Icy Cottage...Newest/Type, and Europe Person and Darkly Pardon and all that jazz), but I have a 160K version which is a few steps nearer to reality – Iamb Bamboo who lives in Goalmouth, Eunuch Person and Dariole Pardon. The correct spelling of Ian in the smaller version is down to the fact that I've already added it to that version. I have a Prospell spellchecker also, but that's all I've been able to make it do – check spellings but not give me an alternative. Why hadn't I thought of this way of wasting a few minutes in merry idleness? Congratulations again.

STRANGE DEBRIS – Chris Carne

Nice intro., Chris; used to do that sort of thing myself when I had more imagination. Re. columnar mode, I looked at your objection a bit blankly. Too much wasted space when you're only using one side of the paper? Anyway, to hop to your bit on the last page, one can make up some of the space lost between columns by extending the width of each separate column. But you're right about columns consuming space – I've been messing about reformatting what I've already written, and it looks as tho' one loses about 1/6th. of available space with two columns. Depressing, but I'm willing to live with it for the sake of easier reading.

Incidentally, I'm using the Bambro method of double columns this time; the crunch will come when I try putting one sheet of paper through the printer twice.

Liked your reviews sufficiently to make a note to get SUPERSTRINGS etc. from the library. The review of the book on AI was also interesting, even tho' you lost me part of the way through. "Workers in the AI field are interested in simulated (ing?) human cognitive abilities and not modelling them" you say, striving for simplicity by an analogy with grammar and parsing, which passes a couple of light years over this simple head. If you have the time, can you go into this a bit further?

I've had the opportunity of watching an intelligence grow over the last few months – a five-month old grand-daughter – and it's fascinating when one can disassociate from the emotional ties which bind a parent and look at the infant from a sort of outsider's point of view. At weekly intervals one can see the lengthening of the attention span from nothing to a few long seconds, for instance.

In your record reviews you say "There are some fucked up people out there, thank God". I thought everyone was in that state. You mean articulate fucked up?

MARAUDER – Ken Cheslin

Hogwash & Milligan brilliant again. Yes, I saw that 'Crimewatch'case of the burglar who left his dog at the scene of the crime – the police just told it to go home, and followed it. See also an update later on about my last newspaper clipping.

Boot sales: You do get, of course, people who buy in cheap goods just to sell at them – the columns of Exchange & Mart used to be full of middle-men trying to unload the stuff – but at book sales in the odd church hall there is, down this way at least, a little band of professionals filling their bags with re-sellable items. Quite nice guys – I know three or four by sight, they're always half-an-hour early waiting for the doors to open – but a pain in the neck in some respects. Luckily, none of them seem interested in sf.

I bet Theo, after reading your comment re. 'city states', will mention G.K. Chesterton's NAPOLEON OF NOTTING HILL, a nice fantasy where future England is split up into dozens of separate units.

RYCT Maureen, it always strikes me as odd that these half-witted people who wave toy pistols at armed police seem always to end up dead, yet in Africa rhinos and elephants are tranquilised without too much hassle. Is it beyond the wit of men to import some of that type of ammo/guns and equip police forces with them?

Glad you found London interesting. Odd – I've never lived further from the centre of it than 10 or 12 miles, but rarely go to that centre. Too noisy, busy, dirty, etc. But I wouldn't dream of living further away.

K18 – self. Soon after I did that art-crime clipping in K18 I came across an expanded article on it in an Evening Standard glossy magazine (it was for free, said he hastily, I don't buy newspapers). It explains one or two obscure bits – of the four men trying to sell the painting one had never seen it, one hadn't seen it for three months, and one thought he was involved in a 'sting' operation involving a forgery. None of them appears to have been involved in the original robbery, when a guy walked out of an art gallery with the painting under his raincoat.

The inept way in which they went about the business was only matched by a police boob, when after an abortive meeting where money (£250,000) was produced but not the painting the police trailed a car to Guildford – where they lost it.

In an entirely separate operation police were tipped off that a house in Bexley had a stolen painting – not specifically identified – and it was recovered. Two days later the crooks were still trying to sell the painting, unaware it had been found.

There's a certain air of mystery as to how the police were able to trace the gang again, but three of them got a 3-year sentence and one 2½-years.

Anyone interested in Lovecraft? I have PBs of The Colour out of Space, At the Mountains of Madness, The Lurking Fear, Dagon, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward and The Haunter of the Dark which will be taken to a local charity shop if no one speaks up. Still have a box of Wodehouse, too – no word from Paul.

Re. my comment to John on the use of the word 'astronaut' [[GARBLED TEXT]] yds. away, but there's a hill en route; 99% of the time I go in the opposite direction to a Tesco which is about 700 yds. away by virtually flat back-roads. It also appears to be cheaper, tho' I've never compared prices [[GARBLED TEXT]] about like an insectile Tarzan, they revert to what appears to be an easier type of web?

That was gentlemanly of you, confessing to confusion re. Widows and Orphans. They've never bothered me, but on (just) looking them up in the near-300p. User Guide to my Amstrad I see that they're lumped together as 'the single line of a paragraph on a different page'.

On the other hand, says he heavily, my Penguin abridged Dictionary of Historical Slang ('72, but a fairly recent acquisition) says "A single word in (sic – not 'on') the top line of a page: printers: late C.19-20. Printer's think it unsightly". I don't know that I care much about what printers think.

I suppose the opposite to 'début' should be something like 'last bow', but one feels there should be a single elegant word.

RYCT me. Interesting aside about when we stopped spelling Yugoslavia with a 'J'. Sometime during the War? I have a '50s atlas which allots it to the 'Y's and an Everyman's Encyclopaedia which uses 'Y' but then brackets "(Serbo-Croatian Jugoslavija)", and a pre-war stamp album which boldly goes for 'J'.

Thanks for the tip about curled photos – I vaguely remember it now from the days when I used to blunder about the bathroom in a ghastly red glow trying to keep fixing fluid from my clothes. Dick Lynch writes to say that he's going to use over 200 photos of '50s fans in the forthcoming book. Ghod, there'll be some revelations. I've received from there the print of a slide taken in 1960 showing me with a full beard – the US visitor who took the snap mentioned it in a '60 fanzine but I hadn't seen it previously. I look like Rasputin's younger brother.

Haven't come across any more Cherryh yet – oddly, the local library don't seem to have her books.

Hadn't heard of Duncollisberg – or was it just a f'rinstance? – but there is another hill-hill-hill around for real; can't remember the name but, sez he lazily, someone will.

Ian and self re. the length of typing possible on a page, etc.

And don't get too disheartened by the manual – you don't say if you have Locoscript 1 or 2, but the early manual for L/S 1 was so obscure that it spawned a whole new publishing genre of books explaining it. The best magazine on the subject is 8000 Plus, tho' it sometimes runs into the same difficulties as photographic journa,s (and I suppose others) – how do you cater for both the experienced user and the raw beginner and satisfy both?

The story was a nice example of youthful enthusiasm – I'm not trying to put you down when I mention that NOVAE TERRAE, the first fanzine in this country, had similar stuff – because it's always good for a giggle.

Interesting about the genealogical researches. Should be easier to trace your somewhat unusual surname than to do so for a common-or-garden one like, for instance, Clarke. My local phone book covering south-east London and north-west Kent doesn't have a Stovold tho' there's nearly two pages of Clarkes – roughly 700. And none of them related to me, thank goodness.

Your Edward must have been pretty well off for anyone to try and fine him such a large sum as five shillings – in 1553, about that time, a barrel of beer and the cask cost 6d., and four 'great' loaves were available for 1d. That means...um, working on the loaves, five shillings would buy you 240 loaves. These days, at 70p each, that's....um...£168. I wonder how it was 'his' tree – must have been a land-owner. Unless he was taking a log home and it slipped from his cart. I'm sure that you can construct a suitable scenario, Brian.

Oh, I notice that you're asking about 8256 hints. Can you specify what? I just started on instructions for changing the amount of type on a page, but it took over 20 lines in Pitch 17 which was a bit too much in an APAzine. One odd tip that I've found is that if, in the early days, you get into a mess, alternately pressing EXIT and ENTER a number of tbthe machine, other than taking an axe to it.

And don't forget that anything you put into TEMPLATE STD will be repeated with deadly regularity on everything you do thereafter – one of my oft-recurring errors is to alter the date on the template, then go merrily ahead with a letter – on the template. Leading to a lot of time wasting DELETING.

Oh. and get a roll of pliofilm and cover the keys with a layer; lot cheaper than commercial alternatives. Protects against dust, dandfruff and (spilt) drinks. AVC

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Vince Clarke's APAzines
Contents

PreviousNext

Notes and Queries
K1
K2
K3
K4
K5
K6
K7
K8
K9
K10
K11
K12
K13
K14
K15
K16
K17
K18
K19
K20
K21
K22
K23
K24
K25
K26
K27
K28
K29
K30
K31
K32
K33
K34
K35
K36
K37
K38
K39
K40
K41
K42
K43
K44
K45
K46
K47
K48
K49
K50
K51
K52
K53
K54
K55
K56
K57
K58 to K69
K70
Books About SF Continued
From K??
Vincentian 1
Vincentian 2
Vincentian 3