Lloyd Penney
1706-24 Eva Rd.
Etobicoke, ON
M9C 2B2
[email protected]
[email protected]
12 February 2003

Dear Michael:

I decided that right after writing a letter of comment on BCSFAzine 357, I should check out your website Hero of the Beach. I’ll have some response to what you have, and some comments about where you’re headed with it.

You’ve gone for a minimalist take on this page, and I like the background graphics. I find that the title page takes you to a list of links, people stop treating it as a publication, and just surf it like a typical website. I treat it like pages of the zine. I know some people wonder if they’ve seen everything on the site, while it is easy to do so with a paperzine. Just have to get used to it.

Zine Listings…Colin Upton is a name from the past…he used to provide local faneds with illustrations and covers.

Editorial…I cut my fannish teeth on both the anthologies my mother used to bring home from the library, and on Star Trek, which the family watched when it first ran on NBC. So, I like both, although I admit, my preferences run towards literary these days. My reasons for reading and watching SF are the same…I want a good story with interesting characters. Books provide more convoluted stories and characters, and television and movies deliver simpler stories and characters a lot quicker; such is the nature of the technology and the attention span of the average SF consumer. There’s always been friction between mediafans and litfans; always will be, I’m afraid. Because I like both kinds, I am sometimes referred to as both litfan and mediafan, and sometimes, I’m neither. I’m expected to like one or the other; liking both often reduces you in the eyes of your peers.

Because Yvonne is a dressmaker and tailor, she has made her own costumes in the past, and she has made costumes for me. We particpated in Worldcon masquerades, and we won a couple of prizes. In those early years, wearing a costume of some kind, usually a ST movie uniform (tough to make!), enhanced my experience of the convention I was at. Later on, though, I found that costumes weren’t all that comfortable, no matter how well they were made, and we just wanted to wear everyday clothes. Sercon fans will wear everyday clothes, yet they will dress up a little bit, not in suit and tie, but in a Hawaiian shirt, or special t-shirt. Long after she made me costumes, Yvonne made me some Hawaiian shirts, and I usually wear those to cons. That’s costume enough for me. I do appreciate good costumes for masquerade, and good hall costumes seem to have become a thing of the past.

For fiction of fashion, Ted Sturgeon was an optimist. Some things are 100% crap.

Toronto fandom has its own pubnights, the First Thursday and Third Monday of the month, and there’s also a Doctor Who pubnight on First Thursday, and a pagan moot on Third Monday, all at different bars or restaurants. Sure the food has to be good, and the atmosphere friendly, but for the numbers these gatherings attract, the main feature of these places is roominess. The fannish First Thursday is at a restuarant called JJ Muggs, at the Eaton Centre at Yonge and Dundas downtown. We have an area upstairs called 18 Back, and it can seat as many as 75 people, and we have come close to filling it. The mailing list that Yvonne maintains now has about 110 e-addresses on it; someone new asks to be added about every week. It has more than adequately replaced the idea of a central SF club in Toronto, and all that needs to be done is arrange the space every month.

Another good V-Con report. I’d like to return to V-Con some year; Yvonne and I were Fan GoHs at V-Con 25. Very enjoyable…does the S’Harien still run the con suite, or did that group disband?

A question about the whole project…do you intend to do another issue, or will you be updating these pages? If updates are what you have in mind, you might want to set up a page of new writings, and then when you have something new, archive the previous in the categories, and inform your mailing list that new stuff is ready. As much as people like surfing, they don’t like re-reading old writings in the hope of finding new writings.

I hope this was the kind of response you were looking for. Let us know if you intend to produce another version or issue, or if there’s something new to see. Many thanks!

Yours, Lloyd Penney.