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OtherRealms Issue 25 Part 01
Electronic OtherRealms #25
Summer/Fall, 1989
Part 1 of 17
Copyright 1989 by Chuq Von Rospach
All Rights Reserved
OtherRealms may not be reproduced without permission from Chuq Von Rospach.
Permission is given to electronically distribute this
issue only if all copyrights, author credits and return
addresses remain intact. No article may be reprinted or re-used
without permission of the author.
Table of Contents
Part 1
Editor's Notebook
Chuq Von Rospach
Part 2
From Beyond the Edge
Reviews by our readers, Part 1
Part 3
From Beyond the Edge
Reviews by our readers, Part 1 (continued)
Part 4
From Beyond the Edge
Reviews by our readers, Part 1 (continued)
Part 5
Scattered Gold
Charles de Lint
Doris Lessing's Canopus in Argos
Fantasy in the Mainstream
Chuck Koelbel
Part 6
Odds 'n' Ends
Alan Wexelblat
Past Imagining: Forgotten Classics
Lawrence Watt-Evans
Part 7
Much Rejoicing
Dan'l Danehy-Oakes
Part 8
Thoughts on Reading the Classics
M. Elayn Harvey
Scattered Gold
Charles de Lint
Part 9
From Beyond the Edge
Reviews by our readers, Part 2
Part 10
From Beyond the Edge
Reviews by our readers, Part 2 (continued)
Part 11
Words of Wizdom
Reviews by Chuq Von Rospach
Part 12
Books and Magazines Received
Part 13
The Agony Column
A Special Look at Horror in the Small Press
Rick Kleffel
Part 14
No Prisoners
Reviews by Laurie Sefton
Part 15
The Agony Column
Rick Kleffel
Part 16
Your Turn -- Letters
Thomas Maddox
Martin Morse Wooster
R. Allen Jervis
George Walker
Sheryl Birkhead
Richard Brandt
Gary Farber
Part 17
Your Turn -- Letters (continued)
Ken Meltsner
David Thayer
Editor's Notebook
Chuq Von Rospach
Welcome to issue #25
Here we are, 25 issues later, still trying to get it right. I never
expected OtherRealms to survive 25 issues and four years (the first
issue was January, 1986, so I'm about to begin year number five).
OtherRealms, on the other hand, is not even remotely the fanzine I
envisioned it to be. Writers talk about a plot or a character taking on
a life of its own. So is OtherRealms, thanks to the enthusiasm and
support of the many writers, artists and readers. I may be editor, but
it's very much a collaborative event, and much of the credit belongs to
the people who take time to get involved and pitch in. The first 25
issues were a joy to publish. I hope the next 25 are as much fun for
you as they are for me.
What I did on my summer vacation
For those who were wondering, no, there was no Summer issue. This issue
is a combined Summer/Fall edition which should be about double the size
of a typical issue. My apologies for the silence, but too many things
happened all at once, and I ended up with the choice of doing a small,
sloppy issue on time or combining Summer and Fall into a double-sized
issue and taking a little more time. Hopefully, now that I'm back on
schedule, I'll stay that way (hint: don't move, have a computer and a
hard disk die within days of each other and then have the disk drive
manufacturer sit on the repair for nine weeks. It does wonders to schedules).
The typo fairie again
The typo fairie was at the last couple of issues. Thanks to both Laurie
and Dan'l and their endless scrutiny of pages of work-in-progress, the
number of typos in OtherRealms has dropped significantly. Unfortunately,
those that are left are sneaking into places where only I can find
them. Calling Sheryl Birkhead Sheila, for instance, or letting the
spell checker rename Peggy Ranson to Ransom. Or, for that matter, the
typo in the return address two issues back (rule 1 of publishing: proofread
everything. Rule 2: proofread it again!). Getting names wrong is
inexcusable and sloppy, and my apologies to the people I accidently dinged.
Promotions
I'm really thrilled to announce the following change in my masthead. We
have, as of this issue, made Laurie a co-editor of OtherRealms,
acknowledging the fact that, for a long time now, OtherRealms is more
than a single person can handle. A lot of the improvements that have
happened in OtherRealms in the last year can be traced back to her by
taking on onerous tasks like editing and proofreading and helping me
think through future directions and design decisions.
The reality is that OtherRealms has grown to the point where, even if I
wanted to, I couldn't do it alone. Laurie's been a lot of help acting
behind the curtain and it's time to make her contributions public.
Without her, there would be no OtherRealms.
Laurie's going to be taking on some of the functions I've been doing as
well, giving us both a chance to work on new and different things. From
now on, please refer Fantasy and Science material to her. I'll continue
to work with Science Fiction and Horror material as well as the art,
although I hope eventually to let her deal with the artists as well
(she's got a much better background in art than I do; unfortunately,
right now, the art is tied too heavily to the layout aspects, which I'm
still doing).
The hope, obviously, is to share the workload so that OtherRealms can
stick to a regular, reliable schedule without either of us burning
out. It's also a way for me to publicly say "thank you" to her for
always being there when I needed a little help or a push, for doing the
grunt work without any recognition, and not killing me when I'm up
until 2AM arguing with Pagemaker.
Laurie, by the way, left NeXT Computer after a few months of continuing
lack of support from management in her attempts to get her job done. On
the positive side, she's now working for Apple as well and having a lot
of fun trying to figure out neat new ways to make NFS throw up on the
Cray and other computers over in engineering. If you want to send her
E-mail, she's at lsefton@apple.com, Compuserve 74010,3542 or Delphi:
LSEFTON. Which makes both of us happy and fixes the problem of not
being able to tell each other what we did at work during the day
(working for competitors can be fun. For a while...).
Futures....
As of this issue, I've gone back to photocopy. Offset printing is
really nice, but it's also expensive enough at my printrun to make it
worth switching back. If OtherRealms ever hits 800 or 900 copies (which
I hope it never does, not for a long time!) I'll have to switch back
out of self preservation, but for now I'm always running out of pages
long before I run out of material and it just doesn't make sense. I can
print more pages of material cheaper with photocopy for now, so that's
what I'm going to do. This involved some tweaking of the layout to
allow for a slightly larger font so everything didn't turn to a grey
mush on the page, but I won't bore you with details since desktop
publishing jargon is boring except to the desktop publisher. From what
I can tell so far, it should be a fine looking issue of about 60 pages.
Material Wanted
With the relaxation of the page count restrictions, I'm once again
hoping to publish material I had to put aside: interviews,
bibliographies, factual science articles (especially with an angle
towards helping people understand or better write SF and Fantasy) and
more unusual items. On all of this, please query the appropriate editor
so we can schedule it in. The Behind the Scenes section is still
available as well, and we have commitments from both John ("Deep
Quarry") Stith and Elizabeth ("The Sheepfarmer's Daughter") for
articles in upcoming issues. I would really like to see more material
on the history of SF and classic works, especially on the Fantasy side
where the classics are less well-known and harder to find.
Techie Tallk
Starting this issue, I've switched from Ready, Set, Go! to Pagemaker.
The main reason was a series of crashes and bugs in RSG 4.5 (one of
which literally ate my hard disk last issue) and a lack of
responsiveness from the software manufacturer. I finally got tired of
it. Fortunately, Pagemaker is a really neat, powerful program that let
me get things done a lot faster than I could with RSG.
Also this issue has been put together on a new computer. Out of sheer
necessity (and a nice employee discount) I've upgraded MacDuff (an
original 128K Mac with lots of added features) to a Mac II. Part of the
reason there wasn't a summer issue was that Laurie's Macintosh blew a
power supply, followed a week later by my hard disk going *poof* and
refusing to work any more.
The hard disk was a Jasmine drive, and Jasmine took three weeks to get
me an estimate for repair; said estimate was almost big enough to allow
me to buy a brand new hard disk (85% of the cost of a new drive). I
declined their generous offer and put the money into a 4Megabyte MacII
with a 40Meg hard disk. Jasmine then took six weeks more to return the
hard disk to me (nine weeks total turnaround to do absolutely nothing).
For someone who depends on a hard disk, these kinds of numbers are
deadly, so I'm unloading what's left of my Jasmine hardware and upgrading
to some other vendor. These times for repair are typical according to
other Jasmine owners (and ex-owners) that I've talked to, so if you're
looking for hardware, think about it before you buy Jasmine. Even if
it's under warranty, can you live without it for a month?
Working at Apple has given me access to lots of neat toys, the most
interesting (for OtherRealms readers, at least) being a scanner and OCR
software. I played with the scanner a bit last issue, but this issue
all of the art was scanned in and laid out electronically. I'm
generally very happy with the reproductive quality and it gives me the
ability to resize and position the artwork more precisely. It also
reduces the amount of post-DTP layout work I need to do, which is
nice. On the downside, though, this issue is going to use up over 15
megabytes of hard disk before I'm done, perhaps 20. Which is a lot of
data. It wouldn't have been possible without the new Macintosh, and not
something everyone can (or should -- scanning is something that takes
practice to do well, I found out) do. But it was fun learning how to
integrate the new functionality into the issue. OCR (Optical Scanning
Recognition) software, by the way, is software that reads a page of
text and turns it into ascii characters. It lets the computer do the
data entry for me. I'm just starting to really experiment with it, but
the results have been encouraging. It's a faster typist than I am, and
it is a lot easier (and faster) to correct the OCR errors than type it
in and then correct my own typing errors.
Finally....
A note to OtherRealms authors and artists. As of this issue, I have
completely cleared out my backlog of reviews and articles sent to me
prior to August 1 of this year. I have, unfortunately, suffered a
couple of catastrophic disk crashes in the last year and one of them
happened while I had a bad set of backups, so I lost various files
including a couple of pending articles. This note is just to let you
know that if you are expecting me to publish something and it hasn't
shown up, it's gone to the great byte-bucket in the sky and it needs to
be resubmitted. I've taken steps to keep this from happening again in
the future, but that just means Sir Murphy will become more ingenious
next time....
For the artists, I current have a large inventory of material -- enough
for the next three or four issues. Since I hate keeping things in
inventory for a long time, I'm asking that you consider OtherRealms a
closed market until the first of the year to give me a chance to use up
some of the stuff I've been holding too long. I like to get things
published in as short a time as possible, but I'm getting more material
than I can use and need to balance things up a bit. I would also be
interested in feedback from artists about the quality of the
reproduction of the scanned art -- it may be good enough for me, but if
it isn't good enough for the artists, it isn't good enough and I'll go
back to the old ways of X-acto knives, waxers and Band-Aids.
See you next issue!
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