Martin Morse Wooster, Silver Spring MD

Many thanks for Challenger #25. I always like reading Mike Resnick's diaries, and the account of his adventures in Los Angeles was, as always enjoyable. I've never seen the downtown Disney in Orlando, but I thought the one in Anaheim was pretty – one glance at those flowers told me I wasn't on the East Coast anymore – but synthetic. (When I go shopping, I really don't want to have a pop soundtrack undergirding my purchases, this grumpy baby boomer said.) As for Marie Callender's (not "Callendar's"), we used to have them out here, but the one I went to turned into a Brazilian churruscaria (that's Portuguese for "Bring me some meat!") place years ago. The pies were indeed quite good.

I'm glad you reprinted your Alfred Bester interview. I remember very little of the one conversation I had with Bester, except that the man was a professional. And one of the duties of being a professional writer is being nice to your fans. Of course fuggheads should be dismissed, but being a pro means being polite to everyone. Bester certainly knew that; so do Fredrik Pohl, Gene Wolfe, Brian Aldiss, and Terry Pratchett. It's the insecure minor writers who impose unreasonable demands on con committees and are rude and obnoxious in general. These temper tantrums are one reason they're minor writers.

In our genre, maybe, but that judgment could be due to their violating the social expectations of the science fiction community. Only a very few SF writers can act like snobs and get away with it. However, I've seen major mainstream writers – Saul Bellow, for instance – behave petulantly and impatiently towards readers. That I ascribe to the distance imposed by genius; Bellow, after all, won the Nobel Prize. No, I must disagree here: the only duty of a writer is to write – the only duty of an artist is to tell the truth.

I also enjoyed your stories from your work as a public defender. Why did you get into this line of work? What do you enjoy the most about your job? I bet your workload is horrendous and that many of the people you represent are indeed scum. But I also bet you get a great deal of pleasure out of helping poor people who have indeed been shafted by the system or by overzealous prosecutors.

I picked up my interest in criminal law from To Kill a Mockingbird – providentially, on the tube as I write – and The Defenders, the great TV drama of the early sixties. My main satisfaction from the work comes from helping normal people who have blundered into trouble – fallen into addiction or written bad checks or engaged in petty larceny because they're broke. It's also enlightening and perversely diverting to deal with sociopaths. How better to appreciate normality than by comprehending aberration – and how better to appreciate the oneness of humanity than by seeing how little aberration deviates from the norm? "There's only one make of man, not two …"

Curt Phillips delivered a worthy tribute to Bob Tucker. I remember Tucker from the period in the late 1970s when I was a Midwest fan and took part in a few "Smoooths!" at a Chambanacon or a Windycon. I've read some of Tucker's fan writing, and have a copy of the Incompleat Bob Tucker. Phillips is right that Tucker's fannish legacy is reminding us that there's far more to being a fan than writing letters to prozines complaining about authors with PhD's who don't know the correct melting point for busbars. But the wrong lesson to learn from Tucker's writing is that it's not fannish to be serious or passionate about SF or science. We should all try to be good writers and witty ones, but we should also realize that there's far more to writing than contemplative navel-gazing.