Munedawg Communications

This is a belated but satisfying blog post. I’ve always loved books and writing and eventually hope to get published. I, and friends of mine, have written for various fanzines which actually is a way to hone your writing skills and get noticed, at least on some level. In addition to writing for and editing our own fanzine, Robots, Rebels, and Renegades, I have written for other publications such as entertainment journalist Joe Nazzaro’s Red Dwarf fanzine Stasis Leak.

Robots, Rebels, and Renegades info on Fanlore: https://fanlore.org/wiki/Robots,Rebels,%26_Renegades

Stasis Leak info on Fanlore: https://fanlore.org/wiki/Stasis_Leak

Yeah, I wrote stories for the first two issues (“Stack O’ Tracks” was one of mine).

But three other friends of mine have achieved professional publishing success. Jennifer Pelland has been writing short fiction for science fiction magazines and has even been nominated for a Nebula award.

She has published a science fiction novel, Machine, a story of a terminally ill woman Celia who has a bioandroid created so that she can live on. A very good first (published) novel exploring what it really means to be human and an exploration of the growing transgenic movement (think Ray Kurzweil, etc.).

She has also a short story collection, unwelcome bodies:

“Separate your mind from your flesh and come in. Welcome…”

Table of Contents 
“For the Plague Thereof Was Exceeding Great”
“Big Sister/Little Sister”
“Immortal Sin”
“Flood”
“The Call”
“Captive Girl”
“Last Bus”
“The Last Stand of the Elephant Man”
“Songs of Lament”
“Firebird”
“Brushstrokes”

And she has written stories for other anthologies: Demon Lovers: Succubi (“In the Manner of his Choosing”) and Unidentified Funny Objects (“Temporal Shimmies”) among others.

Another friend, writer and artist David J. Koukol, has written many books, including a trilogy featuring the adventures of Lieutenant Taylor Bell, an operative from the ultra-secret military organization known as Stone Fort. So far I’ve only read the first Taylor Bell book, but I will check out the other two books in the trilogy.

As well as stand alone books…

Dave also illustrates his own books, which to me is sort of a throw back to our time in the ‘zines. He has gone the self-publishing route, which can also be a really good route if you want to get your stuff out to the reading public. And his books are available on Amazon and Barnes and Noble.

Another friend of mine, Larry, I know is a writer and has a manuscript that he is getting ready to publish. What I didn’t know was that he already has a published book: Traps: A Novel:

I will be purchasing a copy of the book from him directly, but it is also available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble. The plot sounds interesting, a backpacker Baz Billings and his girlfriend run into a professional hit mob while on a camping expedition to the Adirondacks. Sounds exciting! 🙂

I am reminded somewhat of Ian Fleming’s Bond novel The Spy Who Loved Me, in which Bond runs into some mob killers while staying at a hotel in the Adirondacks.

Because Fleming had experimented in this book by having the narration done from a female character, Vivienne Michel, I had previously avoided it thinking that it probably was pretty bad. Not so! One summer, when I read all Fleming’s Bond books in writing order (I learned that they make more sense this way, since Bond’s story is a continuing narrative in the books) I did finally read it and was pleasantly surprised, it’s actually not that bad, just different from his other work.

Our group, The U.S. Branch of U.N.I.T., had also run the United Fan Con convention in Boston, Springfield, and Quincy Massachusetts (as well as the New England Fan Experience in Boston and Cambridge Massachusetts). On Thanksgiving I did a deep dive on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine for our convention and came up with two gems, also relating to books. I discovered that a friend of our convention, actress Claudia Christian (“Susan Ivanova” from Babylon 5), had mentioned us in her mini biography My Life With Geeks & Freaks:

It is a very candid, funny, and entertaining book, but of course you’d expect that from Claudia! 😊 And she did relate an incident that took place at our convention involving a stalker (luckily it ended well). Definitely worth reading if you are interested in sci-fi fandom, celebrities, etc.

Then I discovered that our con is also mentioned in Chicks Dig Time Lords: A Celebration of Doctor Who by the Women Who Love It.

And I discovered that we are indeed mentioned in this Hugo Award winning book! 🙂 The name of the book is taken from a T-Shirt that was worn by Christa Dickson at Chicago TARDIS 2007 and it features articles from women across the Doctor Who fandom “universe”, from actresses Sophie Alfred (“Ace”), India Fisher (“Charley Pollard”), Lisa Bowerman (“Kara” & “Bernice Summerfield”), to John Barrowman’s sister Carole, to established authors and academics like Elizabeth Bear, Helen Kang, Lloyd Rose, Francesca Coppa, Lynne M. Thomas, Jody Lynn Nye, Amy Fritsch, Seanan McGuire, Kathryn Sullivan, Laura Doddington, LM Myles, Kate Orman, Shoshana Magnet, Robert Smith? (yeah, there is one dude! 🙂), Mary Robinette Kowal, K. Tempest Bradford, Christa Dickson, Catherine M. Valence. Rounding out the ensemble are journalists such as Jackie Jenkins, Deborah Stanish, & Tara O’Shea, costumers such as Johanna Mead, and con organizers such as Jennifer Adams Kelley.

Specifically we are mentioned in the chapter “Marrying Into the TARDIS Tribe” by Lynne M. Thomas (p. 81) in which she mentions attending United Fan Con 10 in 2000, in which we had Frazer Hines (“Jaime” from Doctor Who), Ethan Phillips (“Neelix” from Star Trek: Voyager), and Robin Sachs (“Sarris” from Galaxy Quest) as headliner guests, United Fan Con 11 in which we had Colin Baker (“The Eighth Doctor” from Doctor Who), Marina Sirtis (“Deanna Troi” from Star Trek: The Next Generation), Richard Biggs (“Dr. Stephen Franklin” from Babylon 5), and Jason Carter (“Marcus Cole” from Babylon 5) as headliners, and United Fan Con 13 in 2003 in which we had Peter Davison (“The Fifth Doctor” from Doctor Who), Katy Manning (“Jo Grant” from Doctor Who), Matthew Waterhouse (“Adric” from Doctor Who), and Michael Shanks (“Daniel Jackson” from Stargate SG-1) as headliners.

She talks about meeting Bill Baggs, the owner of BBV Productions, writer Paul Ebbs, and artist Steve Johnson from BBV, at United Fan Con 11, and striking up a long lasting friendship with them. Personally I remember actress Jo Castleton, (who had also acted in a lot of BBV productions) from their entourage; she was one sexy babe! And she talks about taking her daughter Caitlin to United Fan Con 13 and getting photos with Peter Davison and Katy Manning.

But also Sophie Aldred talks about being invited to conventions in America; she was a guest at United Fan Con 1 in 1992.

In the chapter “My Fandom Regenerates”, Deborah Stanish talks about the relaunch of Doctor Who and people’s complaints about the new show “sexing up the TARDIS”. And I’ll admit I was one of the people complaining! I think that the original concept of Doctor Who had the Doctor (played by William Hartnell) as the “wise old man” archetype, which was complimented by the young Susan as his granddaughter for youngsters to identify with, and the teachers Ian and Barbara (William Russell and Jacqueline Hill) for the parents to identify with.

In the new show they have the Doctor having romantic notions about his female companions, which definitely wasn’t in “Classic” Doctor Who. Maybe they were a couple of nods to some sort of frisson like at the end of the Jon Pertwee serial “The Green Death” (1973) there is a scene where Jo is seen marrying the hippie cult leader Dr. Clifford Jones and the Doctor wistfully looks at the happy couple and quietly slips away, underlining the fact that he his concerns are much larger and that Jo was only a companion, not a love interest.

But it’s true that the character of Romana (played by Mary Tamm) did seem like a possible mate for the Doctor since she was a fellow Time Lord and in “The Ribos Operation” (1978) the Doctor muses that she is in “such wonderful condition”!

But in the following Peter Davison era of the show producer John Nathan-Turner and script editor Eric Saward tried to contrast the youthful looking Doctor with the fact that he was an 800 year old (or whatever) Timelord. In “Snakedance” (1983) Nyssa (played by Sarah Sutton) is seen showing off her new outfit to the Doctor, who is obviously oblivious to her charms:

THE DOCTOR (puzzled look): You look different…

NYSSA: Yes, Doctor!

And in “Enlightenment” the First Mate of the SS Shadow Mr. Marriner comments on Tegan:

MARRINER: Your companion is a very beautiful woman.

THE DOCTOR (unaware, staring at a piece of celery): Is she?

Contrast this namby-pamby type of interplay with Nu Who in which it is full on! Well, sort of. I mean blimey, there’s little left to the imagination in this new show!😊 Unlike in the JNT era of the show there is hanky panky in the TARDIS! Who bloody ordered that! 🤨

For instance in the Tenth Doctor’s (played by David Tenant) tenure there is the “School Reunion” episode in which it is implied that the Doctor had always had a romantic relationship with Sarah Jane Smith which totally contradicts the character’s previous travels with both the Third and Fourth Doctors.

Although I’m the first to concede that there was always the question of whether Susan was actually the Doctor’s granddaughter or if it was just her affectionate way of addressing him, the whole question was always left unanswered, because it implied that the Doctor did have sex and did have a family. But otherwise as Lloyd Rose puts it in this anthology “for 33 years the Doctor was as chaste as a Grail knight.” But then in “The Dalek Invasion of Earth” (1964) Susan falls in love with a human, David Campbell, so Timelords and humans are seen as interacting with each other in a romantic way. And Leela falls in love (in a totally bogus plot device) with Andred at the end of “The Invasion of Time” (1978), again establishing that humans and Timelords are compatible with each other.

And there are personal resonances for me in this book in that there are discussions of the fanzines that I have had experience with. Jody Lynne Nye talks about a number of fanzine aspects in her chapter “Hopelessly Devoted to Who”. She mentions that the majority of Doctor Who ‘zines she was familiar with were written and edited by women, but I’d like to point out that she didn’t read our Robots, Rebels, & Renegades!

As I mentioned in a previous post, we had stories and scripts that were based on a number of TV shows. And I was always proud of the fact that we also had an original section where we had, well, original science-fiction and fantasy stories just like you’d find in a science-fiction mag like The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. But we did also have some, shall I say, material that was sort of fangirl lusting after Paul Darrow who played the character of “Avon” in Blake’s 7. But hey, I love Blake’s 7 as well, just in a different way!

Speaking of that, Kathryn Sullivan in the chapter “The Fanzine Factor” talks about meeting Paul Darrow and Terry Nation, Doctor Who writer extraodinaire and creator of the Daleks. I too had met both men, now both sadly deceased. I met both Darrow and fellow actor Michael Keating (“Villa”) at a convention in the late ’80s in Wakefield, Massachusetts that was originally going to feature Jon Pertwee as the headliner guest but he had cancelled due to a health problem and the organizer had booked both Darrow and Keating instead and transformed the con into a Blake’s 7 one, which was great as well. Not only did someone remark that I was Keating’s brother, because at the time I did bear a physical resemblance to him (somewhat) but I got to play a game of Trivial Pursuit with these two guys with other fans. I was on Keating’s team and although we were doing good at first 😊 we got pummeled at the end! 😒 Also, Darrow always played the “Silver Screen” edition of Trivial Pursuit, so that was really “fair”, playing against a professional actor! 😂

I met Terry Nation at a convention in NYC, also (I seem to remember) in the late 80s. He was a really nice man and truly cared about meeting the fans.

Kathryn also talks about becoming a “minder” at various cons:

I had cut back my attendance at conventions to mainly media conventions and then to basically only Doctor Who conventions. Because I had volunteered at several of those conventions (usually in registration, art show, and security) for a number of years, the con committees of conventions in the 90s such as Visions knew me, and knew I could be trusted to not to drool on guests. In that way I became a guest escort (or a “minder”, if you will) for Doctor Who guests such as Terry Nation, Colin Baker, Peter Davison and Sylvester McCoy.

At our convention, my friend Dan Bullenkamp did a lot of this as well, driving the guests to our con and being the guest liason at the con as well. And although I mainly handled the video portion of our con (video coverage and TV ads) I also had done a little bit of this as well precisely for the same reason that she mentioned, that I just act normally around people even if they are famous personalities. At one con I got to drive David Prouse (the “body” of Darth Vader, “Julian” from A Clockwork Orange) to the airport and at our first con I got to drive Sophie Aldred around, which leads to another funny story in that since I had a non-working gas gauge in my car I actually ran out of gas with her on the Tobin Bridge in Boston. Then because the tow truck driver has his wife and young son with him, Sophie had to sit on my lap on part of the return journey! 😍 And no folks, I didn’t really plan it!