Mimosa 20
Reviewed by Leigh Kimmel
Mimosa 20 is the latest issue of a fanzine that I received for having written a LoC on the previous issue. Issues are available on the Web at http://www.smithway.org/mimosa. I've since discovered that this fanzine is on the Hugo ballot for Best Fanzine.
The cartoon cover of the alternate history of the Roman Empire is hilarious. I have a particular fondness for alternate histories (particularly those of Harry Turtledove and of S. M. Stirling), and while I enjoy the serious ones, I also like a good funny one as well. It sort of reminds me of a Saturday morning cartoon when I was in grade school (title long since forgotten -- it only ran for one season and then got canned) which was supposed to be set in a Roman Empire with modernistic conveniences (along the same lines as the Flintstones, but Roman instead of prehistoric).
The editorial about digging out the kitchen table sounds quite familiar. I've found some interesting things when I've gotten around to sorting through the various stacks of items that tend to accumulate around my apartment. (Fortunately, the kitchen table doesn't tend to accumulate too much stuff because I set up my laptop computer on it for file transfers, so I need that space open all the time).
Jack Chalker's "A Short History of Baltimore Fandom" was interesting, offerring as it did a window into the early fan activity of several people who have since gone pro. The part about the accidental meeting with Dave Ettlin rang quite true -- it's often those kinds of accidental encounters that lead to continuing contact and lasting friendships.
I liked all the different takes on the cartoon in "Rostler traces." It's always interesting to see how different people will caption a cartoon, and occasionally add additional material to make the gag even funnier (I remember one in which there were over nine different versions of a cartoon of a man sitting at an exploded computer). And Ian Gunn's commentary, done as a diary of an expedition, was truly hilarious -- once I realized that it was a joke (I first saw it while glancing thru the zine and didn't realize the context, and got rather alarmed until I thought to read the rest and see that it was a joke).
Ron Bennett's "I Spy With my Little Eye" was an amusing, albeit frightening, look at Cold War paranoia and just how pervasive it was at its height. People worry about us fans getting confused about what's fantasy and what's reality. But it looks to me like quite a lot of those mundanes seemed to have lost track of the fact that James Bond is just the product of Ian Flemming's imagination.
Sharon Farber's "Tales of Adventure and Medical Life # 14" was more alarming -- particularly the part about the unethical physician who was standing around while the bleeding stopped. These kinds of people are the ones who make it difficult for the honest medical people who just have the misfortune to run up against the limits of medical science -- people are more likely to attribute a failure to willful malpractice when there are these kinds of egregious misbehavior than when people are generally doing their level best.
The latest installment of "Through Time and Space with Forry Ackerman" was another excellent window into a period of fandom before my time. I especially liked the co-incidence of Bob Greenberg finding the roll of film that Walt Willis had lost at Disneyland half a year ago. It's truly a wonder that it was found by someone who'd recognize the people on the pictures and be able to route them to their proper owner.
Dave Kyle's "Farewell, Teens, Farewell" was yet another wonderful piece of fan history, including an account of the very first sf conventions. Somehow it's not surprising that there are no comprehensive accounts of those events -- we generally don't realize that things like these are significant while they're happening. They're just something to do. Only afterward do we realize in retrospect that this was an important event and try to remember just exactly what did happen and write down what memories remain, blurred as they are from the intervening events.
Guy H. Lillian's "It Pays to Advertise?" may not have been "fannish" in the narrow sense of the word, but it was certainly interested to see what fans do when they're not at cons and otherwise being fannish. After all, most of us have to have mundane jobs in order to keep all those little necessities like food, shelter and clothing that require money to purchase.
And the letters are thought-provoking as always. Richard Dengrove's mention of John Alkins' attempt to reconcile all the sf published to that time in Tommorrow Revealed makes me think that the best way to do such a task would be to treat it as an expanding tree of alternate timelines rather than a single timeline to be explained away. One choice leads *here* while another leads *there*. (Of course considering that I have a certain fondness for alternate history, it stands to reason that I'd enjoy this sort of approach, trying to map out the various alternative futures and where they branch from one another).
The closing comments were yet another proof that mundanes really don't understand the fan community, even when they try to act like it (IE the SciFi Channel's media-oriented coverage of LAconIII). I've spent the last several years trying to educate my terminally mundane parents on just what cons are like (they still have the idea that a sf con is something like a professional conference for writers), and finally gave up when I realized that they Just Didn't Get It.