Richard Lynch, Gaithersburg, MD, USA

On aging pets: “Thirteen, deaf, her eyes shining with cataracts, Jesse took a wrong step.” We have a cat that’s going to be 19 years old in January. She’s having some health problems, and has more or less recovered from a moderately bad stroke three years ago. But she still acts like a kitten and is enjoying life.


On road trip side trips: You mention that the Robert E. Howard house consisted of five small rooms. That sounds like what we found the home of Carl Sandburg to be when wee visited it on the way home from Iowa a year and a half ago. It took all of five minutes to see everything, but it was still worth the detour to get there.

On roadside vegetation: “We stopped to walk among the towering saguaro cacti, the old men of the desert, wrinkled arms raised in vegetative salute.” On the way to Ventura, Nicki saw her first cactus-in-the-wild, but it wasn’t anywhere near as impressive as the saguaro you saw. It was some prickly pears, growing peacefully alongside the highway near a rock wall.

Rich refers to the photo with which I open this Challenger – included with the printed version of The Fantastic Route.

On out-of-the-way places: “We had to find the fanzine room, which L.A.Con had established in a distant corner of the Hilton.” Milt Stevens told me that he had asked for it to be in the Hilton so the room could be kept open for parties in the evenings. That worked pretty well for those who know about the room, but for most of the convention it was if the room didn’t exist. I respect Milt’s decision, but I don’t agree with it. The fanzine area gets much more traffic and interest when it’s located in the concourse area of the convention. There probably are some budding fanzine fans out there but we may never find them if we keep sacrificing outreach for convenience.

A related problem was that all the fan-oriented programming was also in the Hilton instead of alongside the rest of the programming in the convention center. The result was that hardly any fan program item had an audience of more than ten people. Worldcons lately have been ghettoizing fan-related programming. Even the filkers had a better location than where the fan programming area was.

A definite generation gap seems to have appeared in fandom, which Milt himself articulates in his own LOC, coming up. Fanzine fandom is indeed in a ghetto – but that was true even at Noreascon, where the zine lounge was located front-&-center in the Hynes. The truth is simple: fanzines are the province of our generation and those before it. Younger fans communicate by blog.

[And what, pray tell, is this? ;-p ]