Wednesday, November 15, 2006
Warp Spring 2006, Vol. 30 02
Warp Spring 2006, Vol. 30 02 / Cathy Palmer-Lister, MonSFFA, P.O. Box 1186, Montreal, Quebec H2X 4A7 Canada / www.monsffa.com / cathypl@sympatico.ca / Any zine which opens with a lettercol in which The Zine Dump is quoted is okay by me, but as I'm a big fan of Warp, Id be cheering it anyway. The quarterly pub of the Montreal club, Warp has dropped its predilection for parody covers ("It was fun," says editor Cathy, "but I was running out of ideas!") but the variety that's marked past issues continues to distinguish the present. Barbara Silverman's "The Other Jawa" is an archaeological piece about a (practically) prehistoric town in Jordan. "Jurassic Beaver" is not about what you're thinking, but concerns a creature called Castoracauda lutrasimilis, apparently an extremely early mammal. Keith Braithwaite wrote the article on it. Another long chapter of a fantasy, The Last Mage, follows, preceding a nifty section on the work of Ray Harryhausen, again by Braithwaite. I must offer special thanks for this article. It brings to mind the 6-year-old GHLIII watching in terror a TV trailer for It Came from Beneath the Sea: a giant wormy tentacle lashing into upper-story windows and crushing pedestrians on a city street. How would it have affected that cringing brat to know that he would someday meet the man who made that tentacle -- as I did, at a New Orleans convention in the '90s. Anyway, the zine goes on to offer a fascinating 1913 tale translated from the French, an irresistible fan fiction melding Dr. Who with Smallville, a couple of fanzine notices, and club news. We've got to get up to Montreal sometime, because MonSFFA works it on out!
