The SF Site: Letters to the SF Site

Letters to the SF Site

We love letters. They make us think. They make us laugh. They make us sit up and take notice, and get a payment in before service is disconnected.

Mostly, though, we enjoy hearing what you have to say about the SF Site. No publishing enterprise can survive long without paying close attention to its audience, and we're no different. If you've got a comment or thoughtful suggestion, or if you just want to complain about that durned dead link, we want to hear about it.

Laurell K. Hamilton Information

From: Darla

In your letters section [mid-December] you got asked about Obsidian Butterfly. It is an Anita Blake book. It will be released Jan. 10. The next book is Kiss Of Shadows and comes out in the fall of 2000. It is a new series start for Laurell. I know, I am co-president of her fan club and Laurell was generous enough to share that info with us. Smiles....Darla

Thanks a lot for the update. I am sure that Laurell's fans will be glad to know about the new books, and about the website too.

Cats or Dogs?

Also in our mid-December Letters column, Bill Singer asked about the following...

My mother-in-law is looking for a SF story, probably from the 70s: aliens come to earth, evaluate all they see, and come to the conclusion that cats rule the earth (cat owners feed them, open doors for them, etc.). Any help will be appreciated.

Bill Singer

Our intrepid SF Site staff weren't able to recall this story, but Rande G. Jacobson came up with a possible answer for us. If anyone out there has a better fit we'd like to hear about it.

This sounds a bit like the Eric Frank Russell story "Into Your House I Will Creep." I read it in The Best of Eric Frank Russell (1978).

Other than it is about dogs and was first published in Astounding in 1957 it sounds like it.

I know, I know, it's a stretch, but what the hey!!

Rande G. Jacobson

Convention Listings

From: J. Gravitt

Please delete all of the 1999 conventions. I don't like to read outdated stuff. Toronto July 1999 is very old as an example.

It is our practice to link to convention sites for some time after the convention has been held. There are a number of reasons why this is done. One is to allow visitors to find out con details for the next year until the committee has had time to post details of the next one. Another is to view post-con updates featured by many of them. A third is to give visitors a sense of what the con was like which allows them to decide whether to attend the next one.

Ideas for Starting Out

From: Laura McManus

Hi, I am a junior at Lafayette High School, and I am currently starting a science fiction club at school. We will be reading several novels, and I would appreciate any suggestions you have of classic science fiction. Thank you for your time.

Laura McManus

Everybody has their favourites but I suspect that others would roll their eyes at some of them. I'd suggest you try: Internet Top 100 SF/Fantasy List

Help Desk

From: Richard Wilkerson

When The Matrix came out, I remembered a story in Analog along the same lines. I would like to find this story, but can't recall author or title. Are there newsgroups or contacts with Analog magazine that I might contact?

The story went as follows:
A society where everyone lives in a big holodeck, but they know it. This one guy gets tired of all the games and asks to be unplugged. He is told there is a group of discontents like himself who are being sent to another planet to colonize and he is free to join them. He does. But the last scene is a coffin-like holobox that people use to plug in being carried down into the vaults, and the workers casually talking about another one that is getting the final plug-in and won't be unplugged every again.

Would love to know the author and title of this story in Analog. My guess is it was in the early 1970s.

Richard Wilkerson

We weren't able to come up with the title, although I did have an interesting discussion over the possible similarities betweenThe Matrix, Dark City, and "The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag" by Robert Heinlein. We're hoping that our readers might have a suggestion for us.

As an alternative, you could try posting your query to the newsgroup rec.arts.sf.written. We hear that it's a fine source of information

As you can tell from some of the letters that we posted this month, we sometimes get people seeking information about that story they read years ago, want to read again, and just can't place. It's happened to all of us; it took me 7 years to find Dogsbody by Diana Wynne Jones that way. We'll continue posting letters asking us "Do you recognize this story?" and if you have the answers, we want to hear them.

Until next time.

Kristen Chew
SF Site