***************** ASTRAL AVENUE ***************** July 1987 No. 9 PUBLISHER'S NOTE We're in a quandary. We know a surefire way to make a heap of cash, but are lacking a certain element of success. What we're talking about is writing the screenplay for the inevitable movie of the Iran-Contra affair. Now, right now, before some Hollywood hack beats us to the punch. First, we need a title. Can't sell a movie without a socko title. And we bogged down at CITIZEN SECORD. Second, we have to have some Superstars lined up to convince the studio of the commercial potential of this dog. One again, our imagination supplies Jonathan Winters as Ed Meese, but rolls over and plays dead from then on. Can't you help us with your suggestions? C'mon! We've even bought our tux for Oscar Nite. DEPARTMENT OF AMPLIFICATIONS Some of you probably wondered who I was referring to in the last issue when I said: "Gibson's or Watkins' worlds." In my haste, I confused two names: Walter Jon Williams and William Jon Watkins. Obviously, Williams was intended. That's "Williams" as in surname. Don't know how I could have mixed up two such dissimilar names anyway. Please forgive me for confusing two such stellar luminaries of our pocket universe. This is not the only time I've done such a thing. When I was about eight or nine, I kept getting "retinal" and "rectal" mixed up in my mind. (Luckily, I never had occasion to use the words in conversation.) Oh, I knew the two different meanings -- I just couldn't remember which word meant which. Now, this was about the time when I discovered SF. In this period, "retinal scanners" were a big buzzword. (Ah, whatever happened to good ol' "retinal scanners?" They were the cyberdecks of their day once....) You can imagine the vivid mental image conjured up by this phrase in my dyslexic mind. I always wondered why authors never mentioned the characters dropping trousers before getting their security check.... It seems I might have assembled the last issue, number 8, a little too promiscuously, since I have received empty mailing wrappers back from the PO. If anyone hasn't received their copy yet -- and more importantly, even wants it -- please let me know. MACHIAVELLIAN LESBIANS OF OZ Seems to me I recently read that THE WIZARD OF OZ has been placed by some backwoods school committee on a list of proscribed books, as being detrimental to children. All I can say is: "It's about time." I'm sure you want to know my reasons. First off, I was thumbing through the NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW one Sunday when they were running one of their special Author Symposiums. The question this time was something like, "What book had the biggest effect on you and your career." Guess what Judith Krantz's answer was? Yup. THE WIZARD OF OZ. She claimes it started her on her career when she was just a liddle tyke. Now, if banning THE WIZ will lead to the future prevention of just a single Judith Krantz, I, for one, am willing to chuck the whole First Amendment, and throw in the entire ACLU. But this is not my primary reason for wanting to get THE WIZARD OF OZ off the shelves of our schools, and onto the Vatican Index. I'm afraid that Judith Krantzes will always spontaneously generate, even without this book. No, what I'm really concerned about is the effect of Baum's book on the whole moral fabric of our society. When was THE WIZARD OF OZ published? 1900. When did our civilization start to go to hell on a poetry-cart? 1900. I don't think the connection can be made much clearer than that. What exactly is it, you ask, about THE WIZ that makes it have such a pernicious effect on the moral character of our citizens? To answer that question, we have to consider not just the initial book, but the whole successful, still-in-print series by Baum. (And DEL REY BOOKS has a lot to answer for, keeping this morally bankrupt mind-rot alive under the guise of publishing only "gee-whiz," uplifting stuff.) First off, Oz is elitist. It's described as an earthly paradise where no one has to work, to which only the select few are granted admission. Here we have a denial of the proletariat, the source of all fat-cat wealth, one of the dominant motifs of our century. Oz equals Palm Beach. Second, the place is a monarchy. A sham monarchy to be sure, as we'll see in a minute, but still ostensibly a government ruled by one person, the "benificent" Ozma, and her cabinet. What kind of faith does than breed in the precious flower of democracy? If paradise is a monarchy, why bother to vote for old Senator Blowhard in the next election? Try graphing the decline in voter participation against the copies of OZ books sold. You'll get a big surprise. (I sure did.) Thirdly, the place is constantly at war! What better paradigm for our strife-torn century than OZ? "Nomes" to the left of us, "Hammerheads" to the right, can't let down your guard for a minute, pump up that military-industrial complex, boys, no sacrifice is too great. Let's turn now to the question of what kind of people inhabit the upper echelons of Oz, and serve as examples of behavior to our impressionistic youth. First, there's Ozma, a sex-change deviate. Spent most of her life as a boy, before being turned into a perpetually young girl. (This place is a paradise all right -- for pedophiles! It's swarming with Lolitas.) She is said to be kind and generous, but is really subject to imperial whims and fits of pique. Countered a Nome invasion by wiping out the memories of the invaders. (Shades of 1984, a prefiguration of the mind-control that is another thread in the rotten tapestry of our century.) I don't propose to dissect the vanity and capriciousness of the lesser residents of Oz; I think these qualities stand out plainly enough. What I would like to comment on is the insidious puppet-master behind the whole charade. Glinda the "Good." Glinda lives in a palace attended by hundreds of nubile girls drafted from all the willing (or unwilling?) maidens of Oz. She is constantly to be seen fondling and kissing these girls, as are Dorothy and Ozma, whenever they visit. (Thank God Baum had the decency to draw the curtains on what these wild petting sessions led to!) It is frequently stated that Glinda is Ozma's servant. Yet events belie this. Glinda is constantly saving Ozma's tail from one dire predicament or another. She issues orders, draws up strategies, supplies direction. Glinda, behind her mask of servility and obedience, actually runs the whole show. Ozma is her mouthpiece, her figurehead, just as Ronal Reagan is Nancy's. What appalling cynicism, what corruption! A monarchy would be bad enough, but this transcends such models, and sinks into Byzantine or Florentine duplicity. And how could the relative positions of Ozma and Glinda be otherwise, considering Glinda's superior knowledge, as embodied in her Book of Records? Here we can clearly see the outlines of the most important feature of our age, the power conferred by information. Glinda's book, you'll recall, is like Borges' Book of Sand, the script continually changing, recording everything that happens in Oz and the world. Everything. What people ate, what they did one millisecond after they did it, where they are, where they're going. Try to imagine the amount of writing in this book. Talk about the information explosion! Yet Glinda is abole to read and absord everything in it, able to find jut the tidbit of knowledge she needs to complete here Machiavellian schemes. What a metaphor for the all-knowing state, which governs its citizens absolutely through complete awareness of their every move. In conjunction with Ozma's all-seeing magic picture (closed-circuit TV surveillance?), Glinda's book insures that the domination of Oz's inhabitants is complete. "A boot stepping on a human face for all eternity...." And they call this kid's stuff.... +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ READER: Do not throw this paper away. Read it carefully and thoughtfully. Though you may not be aware of it, YOUR SOUL is in great danger. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ MANY LETTERS, NO REPLIES Dear Mr. di Philipo (sir): Thanx for running my pub-shot in your great mag! Do you run FICTION? My first story "Barking Chrome," was almost accepted by NEW PATHWAYS! And I'll be in MIRRORSHADES IV: BEYOND THUNDERDOME! Viva the Revolution, FLUFFY the CYBERPUP Kenosha, Wis. From JAMES BLAYLOCK: The last issue (number 7) had some great stuff in it. From MICHAEL COBLEY: While your ITGO article was fascinating, it didn't go deep enough, I thought. You talked a lot about whether or not the cyberpunk of Gibson is today-writ-large, and hovered around the "Is it or is it not SF prediction?" question without actually asking it. The SF-as-prediction schtick has been done to death in any number of brain-rot newspapers, yet it is the paradigm that still weighs down the genre with a stifling accumulation of archaic media templates. Far more valuable (and liberating) is the idea of SF-as-theory, which in my view is what Gibson and Sterling et al have been doing all along. From GREGORY BENFORD: Talk in AA about whether smalltime magazines are useful to the field: sure, BUT... not very often. It's certainly true that some fiction that's experimental gets into them, and some of the experiments work, but my impression of most cases is that they cling to the conventional middle much of the time -- or maybe their contributors do. From WILUM PUGMIRE: For a professional writer and editor to say that non-pro publications shouldn't publish fiction by amateurs is absurd. I write entirely for small press horror zines, it is my choice to do so. I am not impress'd with professional horror magazines, and I'm not interested in appearing therein. I wouldn't care if all professional publishers vanish'd, leaving only amateurs. Of cours, I've no interest in turning writing into a profession, so my outlook is weird. Rudy Rucker... must not venture too often into ye 12" single section of record shops, else he would know that disco did not "fade," but is the current trend in pop music. From BRUCE STERLING: Re: your recent AA thing on ITGO. Wise up, man. The reason a "stifling of individual perception" is "crystallizing like amber" around Gibson is because a lot of lazy-ass writers are deliberately ripping him off. It's a matter of commerce, not imagination -- it's more convenient for them to rip Gibson than think. It has nothing to do with your ridiculous notion that there's only one probable future. Nor are there "only so many sources," a laughably smug assertion that only shows you are sleepwalking through as blinding buzzing confusion of potential extrapolative input. Your entire ITGO piece is a transparent attempt to ideologically justify your own science-fantasies, like "Skintwister," which would have us believe that Filipino (Di Filipino?) psychic surgery is, like, for real, man. The premise of "Skintwister" is harebrained, but it kicks ass, so it's okay -- nobody's watching, relax. I don't much believe in Gibsonian AI voodoo gods, either. Your real problem is that you waste time studying hokey SF genre structure instead of the actual living breathing structure of the contemporary world. Start doing this, seriously this time, and a lot of these acronymic "story types" and "subgenres" will shrink to their true level of writerly importance, which is miniscule. From IGOR TOLOCONNICOV: Boris Zavgorodny showed me AA of yours. A curious work, to say the least. The thing which I sadly lack on outside but greatly appreciate is much satirical bend of mind. Sterling expired in a new family transition, and there is a gap in modern contemporary chit-chat zines for me. Try not to waver under pressure. From MARC LAIDLAW: Rudy Rucker points out the great title of Ike's autobiography, but I don't suppose anyone tops Reagan's title: WHERE IS THE REST OF ME? One pictures a lobotomized schizophrenic wandering down the dimlit corridors of power, searching for his evil twin. From ANDREW MC QUIDDY: (AA offers) frank, innovative, and often insightful essays that are a joy to read, and are both intellectually and ideologically stimulating. The recent montage column by Rudy was particularly fun to wander through as it meandered about its myriad anecdotes. From MISHA CHOCHOLAK: I really loved the TV panel thing. Sorry I made that wisecrack and Terry Carr passed away. From RUDY RUCKER: I like Lew's letter (on value of small mags). The astral convention sounds like a great idea. From DAVID D'AMMASSA: Brett Rutherford made some interesting points about allusion, but he reall stepped into a pail of mud by saying "...roick and song lyrics, by their very nature and because of the limited IQ's of most performers, are generally inept and regressive if not Neanderthal in content." Granted, it is perfectly reasonable that for the sake of research, Brett has listened to every song ever performed and tested the IQ's of every rock performer currently in practice, thereby settling in his mind that every song's lyrics are inept, but forgive me if I doubt it. From LUKE MC GUFF: I got a chuckle out of Brett Rutherford's arguments against pop music in stories. Hah! Forget it and calm down, dude, is what I say.... Somebody who can't appreciate the vulgate poetry of something like Hank Williams' "Honky Tonk Blues" or Johnny Cash's "Sunday Morning" or Jimmy Cotton's "Cotton Crop Blues" or the Neville Brothers or Marvin Gaye or David Byrne... they're lacking a certain element of soul. In one case, the rock'n'roll/SF allusion has worked the other way. The Jefferson Airplane quoted Jack Williamson in a song whose title I forget. The lines are, "In loyalty to their kind, they cannot tolerate our rise. In loyalty to our kind, we cannot tolerate their obstruction." Did he get any royalties from that quotation? +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ FOOTNOTES OF GOR by Michael Cobley 1) BLOOD-SPATTERED BEER MUGS OF GOR 2) LONG ARM OF THE GOR 3) GOR AND ORDER 4) SIC TRANSIT GORIA MUNDI 5) THERE BUT FOR THE GRACE OF GOR, GO I! +++++++++++++ RULES FOR SUCCESS BY MEN AND WOMEN WHO HAVE SUCCEEDED -- SAVE ONE DOLLAR OUT OF EVERY FIVE -- GIVE THE PEOPLE WHAT THEY WANT -- DON'T BE ASHAMED OF HONEST TOIL -- ECONOMY NECESSARY TO SUCCESS -- HARD WORK THE CARDINAL REQUISITE -- GET A LITTLE BUSINESS AND STICK TO IT Astral Avenue 9 Paul Di Filippo 2 Poplar Street Providence RI 02906