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Astral Avenue 06
From Rhode Island: The state to which all other Rhode-Island-sized things
are compared -- it's
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ASTRAL AVENUE
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No. 6 Apr. '87.
SF person whose maiden name most closely resembles *AA*: Astrid Anderson.
Official Record of *AA*: Van Morrison's ASTRAL WEEKS.
Official Painting: Dali's PARANOIAC ASTRAL IMAGE.
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You might not notice one way this magazine is
"exclusive." We have no rich advertisers to pay
printing and mailing costs. Even so we send
*AA*
to many wonderful people who can't pay for it in
dollars. They appreciate it because it shows them
a way out of oppression, poverty, giving them
priceless inspiration and hope.
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PUBLISHER'S NOTE. (PUBLISHER'S NOTE is donated this issue by us for a Public
Service Announcement and Quiz.)
Racism is on the rise in this country. We all know of recent events
in Howard Beach, for example. Take the following test (composed by a panel
of scientific experts) to see if you harbor any unsuspected racism.
WHO WOULD YOU RATHER HAVE SEX
WITH?
ASSUMING YOU ARE WHITE:
A) Ronald Reagan/Nancy Reagan
B) Billy Dee Williams/Vanessa Williams
ASSUMING YOU ARE BLACK
A) Redd Foxx/Ella Fitzgerald
B) Richard Gere/Kim Basinger
IF you answered (A) in Section One, please move to Forsyth County
immediately. The same choice in Section Two qualifies you for membership in
Louis Farrakhan's church.
SPECIAL ALL-LETTERS ISSUE
ROB MILLER: In my former lives I wasn't born yet, so this time around I'm
having trouble forming informed opinions.
-- We feel you'll fit right in here, Rob.
DON D'AMASSA: While I think you are too hard on Stephen King, some of your
points are valid. Particularly in IT, there is a repetitiveness of phrase
and idiom that blurs the distinction among characters... Del Rey never
impressed me as a reviewer. He seemed to have this vision of what SF should
be and books were dismissed for not conforming rather than for any inherent
flaws.
-- Don has read more books than Del Rey has published - and we're talking
total units!
ALLEN VARNEY: By and large I agree with Di Filippo's trashing of Stephen
King's work. But the reply to Platt's letter in issue #2 is offensive and
patronizing (to King).
-- To paraphrase Brian Aldiss speaking of Asimov: "What can I say to
(dis)honor the man that he hasn't already said himself?" ('My works are the
literary equivalent of a Big Mac and fries.' King, NY TIMES BOOK REVIEW)
But let a better critic than I reply to the charge of Excessive Vitriol:
"It's true. Critics tend to be an irritable lot... Why do we do
it? First there is the reactive pain. Only those who have reviewed, year in
and year out, know how truly abominable most fiction is. And we can't remove
ourselves from the pain. Ordinary readers can skip, or read every third
word, or quit in the middle. We can't. We must read carefully, with our
sensitivities at full operation and our critical-historical apparatus always
in high gear.... The mental sensation is that of eating garbage, I assure
you, and if critics' accumulated suffering did not find an outlet in the
vigor of our language, I don't know what we would do. And it's the critics
who care the most who suffer the most; irritation is a sign of betrayed
love.... But there are other reasons.... critics welcome any way of
expressing judgements that will be both PRECISE and COMPACT. If VIVID be
added thereunto, fine -- what else is good style?... Wit is a form of
condensation..." (Joanna Russ, F&SF 11/79)
TOM SWIFT: Di Filippo's magazine. General impression is that he's the Andy
Rooney of SF criticism....
--- That's MICKEY Rooney, you pop-icon-slinging turkey! You know, as in:
"Hey, kids, my Dad's got a Xerox machine, let's put out a zine!" But
seriously, folks, we regret that our ideas are not dangerous enough to
necessitate a pseudonym like Mr. (Ms.?) Swift's. One nice thing about a
pen-name: your big public chest-thumping is divorced from your mingy private
actions, so no one can tell if YOU WALK IT LIKE YOU TALK IT!
PETER LAMBORN WILSON: OK, you're probably right re: pop music. But I'm
pretty sure NOTHING'S gonna save serious literature... & ultimately, who
cares? I'm enjoying *AA*. You'd save money by xeroxing on both sides.
ASTRID ANDERSON: ASTRAL AVE is great fun -- have you considered double-sided
xerox to save some bucks? Just watch your spacing for the corner staple.
You're wrong about Bob Silverberg -- he's actually Lou Aronica.
-- Actually, guys and gals, most people tell us that the blank side of each
page is the best part! In truth, tho, Kinko's Copies charges per exposure,
not per sheet of paper, so double-sided copying costs the same. I suppose I
would save in postage -- i.e., I could mail ten pages of text instead of five
for 22 cents. But do I -- does anyone? -- really have ten pages worth of
opinion every month? Simplify, simplify!
As for the corner staple: ever since the PLAYBOY centerfold lost her
staples, a vital element of mystery has fled our sad culture. The flesh
concealed beneath Miss June's staples was always the most erogenous part,
being the only hidden portion of her anatomy. Therefore, we follow the
practice of always obscuring something under our own corner staple, hoping to
restore some mystique to this show-it-all society.
RUDY RUCKER: The writers out here that I see... are getting into the idea of
a new movement called Freestyle. The basic idea is to write like yourself
but more so.
-- No one could write more like himself than Mister Rudolfo von B. Rucker.
MICHAEL ADKISSON: The attitude displayed by the said individual from the
April 1977 ANALOG regarding UNEARTH and new writers is still very much with
us today. People don't want the new and untried -- they want the same old
crap, over and over.
-- For the other side of this issue, read on.
TERRY CARR: For one thing, the quotation from Lester del Rey was simply a
restatement of something that's been said often and often in fan circles for
forty years or more, to the effect that fanzines (or semiprozines like
UNEARTH) shouldn't publish SF stories by amateurs because there have always
been enough professional markets for good SF stories and even bad SF stories.
(Pause a moment and think of how many stories you've read in the
professional SF magazines that were just plain lousy. If all the
professional editors rejected a story -- even today there are still enough
editors to ensure that despite the personal preferences of each, any good
story will find a buyer -- then that story must be pretty bad indeed.)
Thus, as Lester recapitulated the argument, the stories that get
submitted to fanzines or semiprozines whose rates are negligible, usually
about 1/4 cent a word, are those that fall below the measure of quality that
even a pro editor faced with a deadline two days hence would have to observe.
So I think it's clear that the stories published in UNEARTH or any
other not-fully-professional magazine have almost always been the dregs left
over from the professional magazines and books. I have to say that I'm not
particularly impressed by your list of authors whose first stories were
published in UNEARTH, because though all the writers you named have gone on
to establish good and sometimes spectacular reputations with their
professionally published stories, that doesn't guarantee that their first
mini-sales were worth a damn or deserved to be published.
I think the truth is that those early stories just weren't worth
professional publication because the writers hadn't developed their talents
enough yet for the big league.
I could name you dozens of authors who are now in the Big Name
bracket whose first stories appeared in fanzines: Clarke, Bradbury,
Silverberg, Benford, Zelazny, Brunner, Ellison, and a whole lot more. For
that matter, my own early stories, written when I was thirteen or fourteen
years old, appeared in fanzines. I assure you that they were all pretty
terrible.
But since even this mini-list includes writers better than those
whose early stories appeared in UNEARTH, and since those early publications
by writers who are now famous were so bad, you can see why I'm not impressed
by your list of authors in UNEARTH. I think the truth is that professional
editors, considered as a group rather than individually (we all have our
blind spots), will always buy any sf or fantasy story that's even reasonably
good; therefore the stories that appear in less-than-professional markets are
seldom if ever worth reading.
Your claim that 'the field needs more markets, of whatever sort'
thus strikes me as pretty silly. If you seriously consider the history of SF
magazines and such, you won't be able to help noticing that when we had
twenty or thirty SF magazines, as we did in the early 40s and early 50s, most
of the stories that got published in them just plain stank. So do we really
need more SF markets now? Well, I think it might be good if we had one or
two more, just to add to the variety of published SF and fantasy; but if the
short SF market were ever again to expand into the twenties or even the
teens, I'm sure there'd be so many odoriferous stories published that they'd
cause readers to stop buying all SF magazines, and then where would we be?
TERRY CARR.
-- A few cavils (I'm sure readers will be supplying more):
(1). The alternative to working out one's beginning-writer faults in the
short story market is working out one's faults in the novel market, something
we see quite frequently nowadays, as fledgling writers, untempered by
previous sales, produce hand-handed first efforts. It seems to me that a bad
novel would turn off more people to SF than a bad story, leaving a
longer-lasting and bigger foul taste.
(2). Many critics (Aldiss, Malzberg) fell the Fifties were the real golden
age of SF, and can cite works to prove it. Perhaps the "glut" of mags was
partly responsible.
(3). Again, in the Fifties, someone like Dick could at least make a
(horsemeat-level) living off the mags, which is impossible now. What if one
wants to be a full-time writer without producing novels, temporarily or
permanently? More mags would allow this.
(4). Magazines are the cutting edge, short experiments being more likely to
get published than long ones. The fewer the mags, the duller the edge. I
still say: Let a hundred flowers bloom, and let history sort 'em
out!
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ASTRAL AVENUE No. 6 Paul Di Filippo 2 Poplar Street Providence RI 02906
