Mimosa 19
Reviewed by Leigh Kimmel
Mimosa 19 is the latest issue of a fanzine dedicated to fannish history. It is available from Nicki and Richard Lynch, PO Box 1350, Germantown, Maryland 20875, for $4 cash or a LoC of a previous issue (a number of issues are available in electronic form at their website, http://www.smithway.org/mimosa) or a fanzine in trade. (I got mine by sending a copy of SFFS Sentinel, the newsletter of the local fan club that I'm secretary for, so my copy technically belongs to the club).
"The Road to LAcon" brought back some memories of my own. I was there, and got to meet a lot of people that I'd only "met" online thru GEnie or the Internet. I was helping with the SFWA suite, and one of my most notable memories was the night when someone held a leather party (BDSM and other alternative sexualities) on the same floor and someone flipped two digits of the room number in some of the publicity fliers so that they pointed people to the SFWA suite instead. We had to re-direct a number of people to the proper suite.
John Berry's "Shaw to Please" and Harry Warner Jr.'s "North By Noreascon" were very interesting insights into things that happened long before I became active in fandom (I first discovered sf in the typical kids' stories like Young People on Mars and the Mushroom Planet books, but I didn't get involved in organized fandom until the last few years). I especially liked the part about the earliest mention of the Retro-Hugos (which makes me wonder if Bob Silverberg's casual jokes led to the actual decision to start giving retroactive Hugos). The story about Marion Zimmer Bradley's gaffe was particularly funny because of her own account of being on the receiving end of a similar one (described in her "Darkover Retrospective" that was printed in a 70's edition of Sword of Aldones). I wonder if she ever considered the parallel between the two incidents when she judged the other fan so harshly.
I liked Michael Burstein's comment about how his students' homemade award being better than a Hugo. It's often true that these sorts of sponaneous things mean more to us, because they are done by people who know and care about us personally.
The articles by Forry Ackerman, Walt Willis (even if it was a rerun, it was certainly new to me) and Dave Kyle, all about events in fandom that had happened before I was even born, were even more fun, since they dealt with the days when fandom was still a very small organization and everybody knew everybody else. (That's a lot different from the present day when Worldcons have attending memberships in the multiple thousands and people tend to clump into smaller sub-fandoms centered around a particular author or fictional universe (Sime~Gen fans over here, Darkover fans over there, Mercedes Lackey fans down the hall, Trek fen upstairs in the big suite). It's almost tempting to long for those days when "ordinary" fans were able to hang out with big-name pros like Asimov, but on the other hand, there is a far wider variety available for every possible fannish taste.
I enjoyed Sharon Farber's discussion of Vulcan evolutionary biology in "Tales of Adventure and Medical Life 13 1/2." It's always fun to watch someone playing the Game with the quirks of a fictional universe, explaining how the apparent errors aren't really errors at all, but exceptions that prove the rule.
On another level, it made me really appreciate the difficulty that a writer faces in the process of worldbuilidng -- we have to simultaneously balance the need for scientific believability and the reader-identification element that makes the material saleable. I suspect that the Star Trek aliens are monogamous in spite of all their other reproductive anomalies because of the need to maintain the "wholesome family atmosphere" for mass-market viewing (although monogamy seems to be a value honored more in the breach these days, we like to present the image that we are a monogamous people).
Ahrvid Engholm's "A Smorgasbord of Fan-slang" was particularly interesting in showing how fandom works in another culture. Fandom is becoming increasingly international, and this can only grow with the development of the Internet. One of the fannish lists that I participate in, the Darkover-lovers, is based in Brazil and has members from all over the world.
There was also a fascinating assortment of LoC's printed. Many of them referred to the previous issue, and I want to go to the Website and see the original articles that they're talking about.