Cyberplane #2
This is the second issue of Cyberplane; it is a direct descendant of the old Paper Plane fanzine that I published when I lived in Owings Mills, Md. I lived in Owings Mills for close to 20 years with brief time out for visits to Seattle, WA and some semi-communal living in Columbia, Md. and Reisterstown, Md.
Cyberplane #2 comes to you via the web from Steve Miller, RR2, Box 4570, Winslow, ME 04901, where I live with my wife, Sharon Lee (despite rumours on GEnie and rec.arts.sf.written to the contrary) and a stalwart band of rescued cats who have joined the quest.
LoCs (letters of comment) can be sent via email to kinzel@mint.net; additional issues will arrive webward from time to time. In support, you CAN send stamps, personal photos your mother wouldn’t approve of, silver dimes, quarters, half-dollars, or dollars, or canned salmon. This is a by whim production; there are no subscribers. Copyright 1996 by Steve Miller.
The textured background is my own; I also make web pages. The photograph above is the gift of a fan and was probably taken after 9 PM on a Saturday night at a convention on the somewhere on the East Coast in the year 1977. This may actually have been taken at the WorldCon in Miami…and I see my hair was going grey then in a few spots more than 18 years ago.
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….If none of that makes sense to you, perhaps I should mention that long ago and far away I was considered a science fiction fan. That was a technical term back when most science fiction was in books and magazines and fans were readers rather than watchers. Many, many fans were also writers, and some of the fans I dealt with have, like me, become “filthy pros” in one field of writing or another.
What has gone before
In the first issue of Cyberplane I mentioned that science fiction cons had gotten in my blood. The truth is that, even though I was writing for much of my living in fields outside of SF, most of my community was still within the SF world.
This began to become a problem as my relationship with Sue Miller deteriorated, for we were seen as a unit. Additionally, for several years we were extremely active in BSFS, hosting parties and meetings at our large apartment in Owings Mills (sometimes with more than a hundred attendees over a six or eight hour span) as well as acting as Baltimore in 80 ambassadors in Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, York (PA), and Wilmington, NC.
And so, I’d found myself at loose ends within the SF community and also found myself exposed to other creative types in the music world I was covering for various newspapers. Thus, when I met re-met Sharon Lee at a writing course I was taking at UMBC (where we were both looking (sigh) for easy credits) I was happy to find a science fiction-oriented person to be around again… and also pleased to find someone who was serious about writing.
I’d been exposed to the poets, the would-be great American novelists, and the newspaper people and found some of fandom’s self-centeredness wearing. In Sharon’s presence though the wonder-and-fun part of SF came through again; and the fan feuds and convention-mongering fell into the background. Oddly enough, it was Sharon’s influence and goals (along with those of friend Drew Farrell) that moved me into some of my most intensive convention-going.
The effort, first, to put together the Star Swarm News as a new kind of science fiction publication, failed. We never got the capital infusion that we needed so badly, and the concept (later echoed in the somewhat successful Aboriginal SF) was itself ignored. Fans, it seemed, didn’t want newspapers.
After Aracelli Karri, Inc. essentially went belly up and with it the Star Swarm News itself, Sharon and I moved into gear with Sharon’s lifelong dream — her own bookstore. That melded well with the art agenting I’d been doing on the side, and so was born DreamsGarth.
This is a work in progress; it is copyright 1996 by Steve Miller.