Mimosa 22
Reviewed by Leigh Kimmel
Mimosa 22 is the latest edition of the multiple Hugo winner that is up for yet another Hugo this year. It can be obtained by sending $4 to Nicki and Richard Lynch, PO Box 3120, Gaithersburg, Maryland, 20885. It is also available on the Web at http://www.smithway.org/mimosa and their e-mail address is lynch@access.digex.net.
Richard Lynch's opening comments, "Six Degrees of Walter A Willis," is a neat pointer to just how closely interconnected fandom still is. Although there are more conventions than ever and Worldcons are getting enormous, the major figures of fandom are still astonishingly accessible to the ordinary fan.
Dave Kyle's "Caravan to the Stars" is another fascinating addition to his account of the 1939 disputes within fandom. It's rather strange to think of these Grand Old Men of the sf establishment, such as Isaac Asimov and Don Wollheim, as young men ever so earnestly pursuing their disagreement -- yet everyone was young once.
Mike Resnick's "Worldcon Memories" was another enjoyable piece, dealing as it did mostly with cons that happened long before I got involved in fandom. It's interesting to see how much stays the same even as it changes -- hotel headaches, hideous heat, fannish antics and room parties. I did get to LoneStarCon2 last year, so it was rather interesting to compare notes with Mike's account. I very clearly remember the sumptuous spread the hotel laid out for his kaffeeklatsch, and the meager offerings for the later ones. However I was more than a little alarmed to hear about the pedestrian being killed by a bus mere feet from Jack Chalker, since that was the first I'd ever heard of the incident.
Richard Brandt's "How Michelle went to San Antonio, Attended the Hugo Ceremony and Found God" was yet another fascinating look at other portions of a con too big for one person to see everything (although even the small regional ones are getting that way, with multiple program tracks and whatnot). The part about seeing Larry Niven in a restaurant brings to mind my own encounter with him, two years ago at LAconIII. I was sitting in the SFWA suite one morning and talking with another person (I was helping in it, being a good friend of Kathleen Woodbury who was running it that year -- in the years since, all my efforts to make the qualifying sale have been spoiled by disappearing magazines and other disasters) and Larry Niven made espresso for us.
Lowell Cunningham's "From Rags to Off the Rack" was a fun look at the story behind the movie Men in Black. Of course it's even more interesting now that MIB is up for a Hugo, and probably has a fairly good chance of winning, considering the competition.
Ian Gunn's "Never Work wth Chidren and Animals" was a fascinating look at the craziness and practical jokes of show business. Having been in a couple plays in high school, I remember a few pranks and incidents. Unfortunately my budding show business career was cut short by the fact that we lived so far from the school that it was really burdensome for my parents to take and retrieve me for practice, and the travel time meant I really got shorted on my sleep. So we agreed that I'd not try out for any more plays, in order to keep my grades up for my academic ambitions.
I also enjoyed the reminiscences in Walt Willis' "I remember Me." I particularly enjoyed the observations about the travails of the often-overlooked bit-part characters, who are treated like so many objects in a set piece rather than valid characters with motivations. It rather reminds me of Sherwood Smith's "Diary of a Henchminion," which can be found on her Webpage at http://www.sff.net/people/Sherwood/ (Sherwood is one of those unappreciated wriiters of our age who is being written off by the publishers for less-than-stellar sales, a problem that is compounded by her lack of self-esteem which makes it hard to promote herself).
Ron Bennett's "When the Sky Was the Limit" is yet another fascinating look at fandom on the other side of the Atlantic. The mention of pre-decimal pence makes me think of the very first episode of Dr. Who, in which one of the peculiarities of Susan was her inability to tell how many shillings were in a pound.
I also enjoyed Dal Coger's history of "The Legendary Slan Shack," which shows that fannish co-operative housing arrangements predate the 60's by two decades. I also wonder if the name "Slan Center" was a precursor of the term "Sime Center" in Jacqueline Lichtenberg's Sime~Gen universe (yet another series the publishers dumped in the slaughter of the midlist).
Definitely agreed that Curt Philliips real life activities in "10-70 Structure" are exciting -- when I got to the end and the bit about the report of Princess Di's death, I realized that all this was going on right about the time I was sitting in the Hugo Awards ceremony hall. The scratchboard illustrations really fit the article, since they created the feeling of darkness lit primarily by flames.
I also enjoyed the latest installment of "Through Time and Space with Forry Ackerman" particularly for the memory of his meeting HG Wells, who was quite a bit different in real life from his portrayal in the movie some years back (title escapes me) in which he built a real time machine and had to go to modern-day LA (how it travelled through space as well as time was never explained, but it was clearly *not* London) to stop Jack the Ripper.
Greg Benford's "Save the Last Masque for Me" was a very good rememberance of the late Bill Rotsler. Although I'm sad that I never got to meet him, I'm glad that there appear to have been quite a few unpublished cartoons among his personal effects, so that he will continue to be with us for a long time after he's gone.
The letters were interesting as always, and now that I'm getting more involved in fandom, I'm recognizinig more of them all the time. It was neat to notice that my letter was printed on the page facing that with the letter of fellow FOSFAXian Joseph T. Major, who is up for the Best Fan Writer Hugo this year.
I liked the closing comments -- I dimly remember one of the moon launches. It might have been the first, or one of the others, but I remember standing on the porch of my grandparents' house, looking over the roof of the garage at the full moon in the sky, and being told that men were walking on the moon. I read and loved sf from the time I first discovered a battered copy of "Young People on Mars" and one of the Mushroom Planet books in the local library. When I was in sixth grade I read my first grown-up sf novel, Asimov's Caves of Steel. However it wasn't until I got to college that I finally met other sf fans, and not until much later that I finally discovered cons and fanzines and all the rest. I may not be able to recapture the lost years, but I'm going to make the most of the ones I have left.
As far as the decline of true fandom, I'm wondering if part of it is the shrinking of leisure time as people try to cram more and more into each day. Fewer people have the time to write lengthy LoC's or APAzines, much less publish their own fanzines. Fan club meetings and cons are harder to fit into a schedule that's already bulging at the seams. Those of us who are still actifans have made a conscious commitment to fandom, which often means giving up other things to make room for fanac.