Steve Sneyd, Almondbury Huddersfield West Yorkshire UK

Thanks for Challenger 20 – amazing dragon cover.

A mini-disagreement with Mike Resnick’s very entertaining piece, re his cavil on Blade Runner – surely the point that made it necessary to hunt them down was the damage the replicants could do before they auto-terminated – crude analogy the potential suicide bomber with terminal cancer.

Lovable articles re Julius Schwartz sent me back to my file of corresp from early ‘90s when I was researching life of SF writer/poet Lilith Loraine. Someone mentioned JS had been her agent at one time. DC Comics passed on my enquiry letter to him, and I got a really nice friendly reply – deffo one of the good guys.

Yeah, amazing how Reagan got away for so long with the lovable harmless old buffer/Forrest Gump schtick – after all, his record went way back, to when as Screen Actors Guild official (prexy, wasn’t it?) He acted as fingerman for HUAC. Think reason his best role as actor was vile gang boss in The Killers was for once he could play his real self. Him and Maggie Thatcher lovey-doveying was real villains convention.

The political resonances escape me, but I think Reagan’s best performance was as an epileptic scientist in Night Unto Night.

Probably debilitating European cynicism, but seemed minimal surprise here at the Abu Ghraib carry-on – no doubt in twenty years we’ll find out who at the top gave the orders to treat prisoners like that there (and doubtless at Gitmo and at even more closed-door US prisons in Afghanistan etc.) which got so creatively interpreted by Lynddie England – who doubtless has a profitable future as S&M dominatrix and/or presenter of “reality TV” prog recreating Ab Ghraib with volunteers, if she gets off current legal process.

Mentioning Afghanistan, and thinking of your dope court piece, another thing that has caused no more than shoulder-shrugging here is that the removal of Taliban has meant record opium poppy crop there this year – funds for the warlords busy tooling up with extra arms ready for holding their corner when “democracy” comes. Does raise question, given that no will to tackle them, why not buy the crop off’em direct, rather than just let it hit the streets, depress heroin price, and increase number of addicts – but then I suppose a shortfall of folk locked up for drugs would hit profits of private prison corporations (and keeping underclass in prison stops’em swelling unemployment statistics, so a win-win.) So it goes.